Likewise, there’s little by way of presidential trend-setting. Barack Obama could send a book climbing up the bestseller list by being photographed with it. It’s hard to test whether Biden has the same juice because there haven’t been pictures of Biden buying books. The Kennedy White House spurred a national embrace of French food by hiring a White House chef from France. Biden is known for liking ice cream — though the pandemic-era paucity of big White House events have kept him from serving it to too many people. There’s no restaurant or neighborhood that the new in-crowd has put on the map.

The major reason for this, of course, is out of anyone’s control: the pandemic, an environment where it’s politically and medically unwise to throw a state dinner or step out to a restaurant or visit a highbrow bookstore. That same Gridiron gala Biden skipped was at the center of an elite Covid outbreak that hit official substitute Raimondo, among numerous other top media and political figures. For a 79-year-old man, it wasn’t a great place to be. (Though a glance around the room at the venerable organization suggested that plenty of other septuagenarians weren’t deterred.)

All the same, the cumulative effect is downright disorienting in a place that treats presidencies as cultural eras as well as political ones.