Commander Biden, resisting the urge to bite the president on the Truman Balcony, on July 25, 2022.
Photo: Adam Schultz/The White House via AP)/AP
During his entire time in office, Joe Biden has generated fewer scandals that Donald Trump did during an average week in his presidency. Trump served up a true scandal smorgasbord, from awful things like instigating an insurrection to fun stuff like hawking canned beans from the Oval Office. But the big Biden controversies are all repetitive and depressing. His son Hunter is a recovering addict who’s done some extremely sketchy things (but never took a job in his dad’s administration). Joe may have mishandled classified documents (but not in a fun way). Biden is arguably too old to do the job (but so was Reagan, and our other option is a guy who’s old and also unhinged).
These are things we probably should be talking about, but they’re not the kind of thing anyone really wants chat about with co-workers at the water cooler (or, let’s be real, over Slack).
However, there is one Biden debacle that you can really sink your teeth into (pun intended): His dog Commander biting his way through the White House.
This story has everything you need in a good White House scandal: It’s unique, it’s bloody yet involves no fatalities, and the president’s response is truly mystifying. Plus it just keeps on going! On Thursday, we learned that Commander bit dozens of people and literally left a trail of blood in the White House.
The Bidens have long been plagued by pet drama. They moved into the White House with two German shepherds, Champ and Major. Sadly, within a few months Champ had passed away and Major was rehomed with family friends after biting a mere two people at the White House. Then (while we were still awaiting the arrival of the White House cat) a third German shepherd burst onto the scene: three-month-old Commander.
Last July, we learned that Commander had bitten seven people at the White House, according to records obtained by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch. By the end of September, the number of known Commander attacks was up to 11. On October 4, the Daily Mail reported that the dog had bitten a 12th person — and there were photos of Commander chomping on a groundskeeper’s wrist!
Even more incredibly, the White House was totally unprepared when reporters inquired about why the Bidens were letting their dog use White House personnel as chew toys.
And when Commander was finally booted from the White House days later, officials only revealed that he’d been moved to some undisclosed location. “Commander is not presently on the White House campus while next steps are evaluated,” Elizabeth Alexander, the First Lady’s communications director, said in a statement at the time.
Today, Commander is reportedly living “with other family members.” But he’s still terrorizing the Biden administration from afar. After reviewing hundreds of pages of records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, CNN and the Washington Post revealed that the dog bit Secret Service agents 24 times. And Commander’s bite count is actually higher than that, since the records only cover October 2022 through July 2023 and do not include previously reported incidents involving other personnel.
The new batch of documents included some truly wild details. Secret Service leaders were so worried about the biting incidents that they began tracking them on a spreadsheet. Agents changed their habits and issued internal warnings in an attempt to avoid further mauling, per CNN:
“The recent dog bites have challenged us to adjust our operational tactics when Commander is present — please give lots of room,” an unnamed assistant special agent in charge of USSS’ Presidential Protective Division wrote to their team in a June 2023 email, warning that agents “must be creative to ensure our own personal safety.”
In October 2022, an unnamed Secret Service technician described an incident and said they were “worried about the family pets behavior escalating and that … something worse was going to happen to others.”
As previously reported, an agent was sent to the hospital in November 2022 due to a bite from Commander. The new documents reveal that seven months later, Commander briefly shut down White House tours when he injured an agent so badly that he left a crime scene, according to the Post:
On one occasion in June [2023], Commander ran toward, knocked down and bit a special agent so deeply that the person required stitches and tours of the East Wing of the White House were stopped for about 20 minutes because blood had spilled on the floor.
Commander launched a bloody attack in the White House and continued living there for four months! What was Joe thinking? Exactly how many people did this dog bite? What does this say about White House security? Are the Bidens irresponsible pet owners?
Forget impeaching the Homeland Security secretary for doing his job; these are the questions House Republicans should be asking. And if Trump was smart, he’d be hammering Biden on bitegate, too. Americans have strong opinions on proper pet care, and it’s the one issue where the previous administration was squeaky clean (because Trump hates dogs).
