White House aides and Biden campaign staff are reportedly “miserable” as fear mounts that President Biden will be unable to continue his re-election campaign or serve for a second term.

The latest report of worsening tensions inside the White House comes from Axios, which reported on Friday that morale is low among staffers as communications with higher ups are deteriorating. 

“Everyone is miserable, and senior advisers are a total black hole,” an unnamed White House official told Axios. “Even if you’re trying to focus on work, nothing is going to break through or get any acknowledgment” from superiors. 

LIBERAL NEWSPAPERS, BIDEN MEDIA ALLIES PRESSURE PRESIDENT TO DROP OUT OF RACE: ‘HIS HUBRIS IS INFURIATING’

All eyes are on Biden, 81, to prove that he is up to the task of campaigning against former President Trump as major Democratic Party donors pressure him to drop out in favor of a younger candidate.

Axios reported comments from a “high-ranking Democratic National Committee official” who said, “The only thing that can really allay concerns is for the president to demonstrate that he’s capable of running this campaign.”

HOLLYWOOD MEGADONOR CALLS ON DEMS TO ‘STOP GIVING’ MONEY UNTIL BIDEN DROPS OUT

Supporters listen during a US President Joe Biden campaign event at The North Carolina State Fairgrounds in Raleigh, North Carolina. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

“Everything else feels like ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ by his inner circle to prop him up.” 

Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment on this and similar reports alleging low morale and increasingly tense staffers, but has not yet received a response.

Biden arrives in the Cross Hall of the White House in Washington, D.C.  (Photographer: Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Biden and First Lady Jill Biden hosted a barbecue for military service members on Thursday evening. After he finished his speech, Biden spoke again with a mic.

The crowd began shouting, “We need you!’ to which Biden responded, “You got me, man.”

He added, “I’m not going anywhere.”

The Supreme Court ended its term divided into partisan blocs, with the Republican appointees ruling in favor of former President Trump’s claim of immunity while the three Democratic appointees voiced a bitter dissent.

It’s exactly the result many critics of the court might have expected, with politics driving the law. It’s also what Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has tried hard to avoid — at least most of the time.

For much of this year, Roberts and the justices succeeded in defusing partisan splits with narrow or procedural rulings.

By a 9-0 vote, they threw out a Texas lawsuit seeking to block millions of American women from obtaining abortion pills. They denied gun rights to people who are under a domestic violence restraining order in a 8-1 decision.

But the chief justice did not seek to bridge the partisan divide in the case of Trump vs. United States. He passed up the chance for a narrow consensus ruling offered by Justice Amy Coney Barrett that could have won over the court’s liberals.

A former Notre Dame law professor, Barrett saw no need for a broad ruling on presidential immunity in Trump’s case.

“Properly conceived, the president’s constitutional protection from prosecution is narrow,” she wrote in a concurring opinion. “The Constitution does not insulate presidents from criminal liability for official acts.”

Yes, the president cannot be prosecuted for the exercise of his “core” constitutional powers, she said, agreeing with the conservative majority on that point.

But she said the indictment before the court focused on Trump’s effort to overturn his election defeat by, for example, encouraging Republican state legislators to create false slates of electors claiming that Trump, not Biden, won in their state.

This is “private conduct,” Barrett said. “The president has no authority over state legislatures,” and the Constitution offers Trump “no protection from prosecution of acts taken in a private capacity.”

That was just the kind of middle-ground position that Roberts usually seeks. Instead, he dismissed it.

The court must uphold “enduring principles” involving the “separation of powers and the future of our Republic. … We cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies,” he said, referring to the case before the court.

It wasn’t the first time Barrett split with Roberts this year in a high-profile case involving Trump. One week ago, Barrett disagreed with Roberts and said she would have upheld the obstruction charges against the Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She said Roberts did “textual backflips” to ignore what the law said.

Why did Roberts and the four conservatives on his right insist on a broad ruling on presidential immunity?

Unlike Barrett, all five have worked in Washington in Republican administrations and are attuned to how politics drives most investigations that involve presidents and their administrations.

Roberts and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh worked as White House lawyers for Republican presidents.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch was in high school when his mother, Anne Gorsuch, was forced to resign as President Reagan’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. House Democrats had voted to hold her in contempt for refusing to turn over documents at the behest of the White House involving hazardous waste dumps.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. came to the court after tough confirmation hearings in which they clashed with then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.). More recently, they have been steady targets of Democrats for their undisclosed vacation trips paid for by billionaires. They were the most likely to vote for Trump’s broad claim of immunity.

Many Republicans, not just Trump’s supporters, saw the prosecutions of the former president through a political lens. Never before, they said, had a former president from one party been indicted for crimes by the administration of the party that replaced him.

Moreover, the Trump case took shape in the last year as the former president prepared to run against the Democratic president who ousted him.

In November 2022, Trump announced he would seek the presidency again. Biden said he too would run. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, then appointed Jack Smith, a hard-charging prosecutor, as a special counsel to pursue the investigation of Trump’s actions following the 2020 election.

Last August, Smith indicted Trump for conspiring to overturn his election loss, and he sought a fast-track jury trial for early this year. He also indicted Trump in Florida for mishandling secret and highly classified documents.

Meanwhile in New York, Manhattan Dist.Atty. Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, indicted Trump on 34 felony counts for false bookkeeping entries intended to hide payments to a porn star. New York’s state attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat, sought and won a $355-million civil penalty against Trump for allegedly inflating his assets. In Georgia, Fulton County Dist. Atty. Fani Willis, an elected Democrat, indicted Trump and 18 others on state racketeering charges involving the 2020 election.

Democrats and progressive groups cheered the indictments as signs that Trump was finally being held to account in the courts for his misdeeds. They were not prepared for what happened when Trump’s case reached the Supreme Court.

In early December, the special counsel petitioned the justices to take up Trump’s claims immediately. It is of “imperative public importance” the case move promptly toward a trial, he said. Two weeks later, his appeal was turned down without comment.

In February, the U.S. appeals court in Washington said the case may move forward, but the Supreme Court put it on hold and scheduled arguments for the end of April on Trump’s claim of presidential immunity.

Those arguments and this week’s opinion made clear that Roberts and the conservative justices saw the issue through an entirely different prism than the liberals and Democrats.

“No president has ever faced criminal charges — let alone for his conduct in office,” Roberts said. Responding to the fierce dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, he said she was engaged in “fearmongering” that ignores the “more likely prospect of an executive branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive president free to prosecute his predecessors.” He foresaw “the enfeebling of the presidency” and “a cycle of factional strife.”

Roberts concluded by noting the newly declared immunity for presidents “applies equally to all occupants of the Oval Office, regardless of politics, policy, or party.”

Which poses the greater danger to the nation — a president who can break the law knowing he is forever shielded from prosecution or a president under constant threat that they may face prosecution after leaving office by partisan opponents?

Georgetown law professor Irv Gornstein, director of its Supreme Court Institute, said that question explains much about the outcome.

“If you think that tit-for-tat prosecution of ex-presidents poses a greater risk to the presidency and democracy than Trump, you probably think that presumptive immunity for all official acts makes sense,” he said. “But if you think that Trump is the greater threat, as many Americans almost certainly do, you probably think the court cares more about Trump and his reelection prospects than it does about democracy and the rule of law.”

“When a sizable portion of the public has already lost confidence in the court, that is something the court ought to worry about,” he added.

Many critics on the left said the chief justice had made a colossal error of judgment that will overshadow his career.

Quinta Jurecic and Ben Wittes, writing in the Lawfare blog, called it a “decision of surpassing recklessness in dangerous times.”

The “court majority may flatter itself that it’s staying out of politics. But this is a fairy tale the justices are telling themselves — if they are, in fact, telling themselves this pleasant little tale,” the pair said. “In fact, they are handing a powerful immunity to an adjudged felon who may be about to assume the executive power of the United States.”

Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, a top Justice Department attorney under President George W. Bush, said in response that it will not be clear for some time whether the court made the right call. But he said the Democratic lawyers made a mistake by relying on the courts to stop Trump.

“It has been a fantasy for many years now to think that courts and prosecutors can purge the nation of a law-defiant populist demagogue,” he said. “Only politics, not law, can do that.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom remains steadfastly committed to the Biden-Harris 2024 presidential ticket, despite admitting during an Independence Day Democratic campaign event in Michigan that the presidential debate against former President Donald Trump “did not go as well” as Biden had hoped. 

“I was asked and tasked by President Biden, proudly, to fly from California to Georgia to represent the campaign right after that debate,” Newsom told a crowd of supporters at the Van Buren Dems BBQ for Biden-Harris in South Haven, Michigan, on Thursday. 

“I had a lot of talking points in mind, you may have noticed if you saw me, I didn’t bring them with me. And that’s to make the obvious point — things did not go as well as the campaign had hoped, and obviously did not go as well as President Biden had hoped,” he said. 

Newsom — who has vehemently denied claims that he’s running a “shadow campaign” to replace Biden — was among the 20 Democratic governors who had a private meeting with Biden on Wednesday night at the White House for about an hour and a half. 

NEWSOM’S PROGRESSIVE ACTIVISM, DEBATE SKILLS AMONG VULNERABILITIES IN POTENTIAL NATIONAL CAMPAIGN: EXPERT

“It could have gone two or three hours,” Newsom said of the meeting. “And I mean this with absolute conviction. That was the Joe Biden I remember from two weeks ago. That was the Joe Biden that I remember from two years ago. That’s the Joe Biden that I’m looking forward to re-electing as President of the United States.”

“Things did not go as well as the campaign had hoped, and obviously did not go as well as President Biden had hoped.”

— California Gov. Gavin Newsom

The aim of the meeting was to shore up support among the party’s top leaders and stave off diminishing confidence in Biden’s candidacy.

Among the Democratic governors who were planning to attend in person were Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who leads the Democratic Governors Association; Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; Maryland Gov. Wes Moore; and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, among others.

Newsom added he’s been “going wherever” he’s been asked by the administration, and doing “whatever task, large and small, because I believe in this man.”

DESANTIS VS NEWSOM FACE OFF ON ABORTION, TRANSGENDERISM, WOKENESS AND MORE

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks at a news conference in Sacramento, California, on March 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

“I believe in his character,” he said.

The Golden State governor will also be headed to New Hampshire to headline a Democratic campaign event next week, fueling more speculation that he may be preparing to step in if Biden backs out of the 2024 race. 

New Hampshire is a key swing state in the general election and Newsom, who is a top surrogate for President Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign, will also be campaigning for the president and other Democrats up and down the ticket during his stop in the Granite State, according to sources familiar with his plans.

FETTERMAN HITS NEWSOM FOR NOT HAVING ‘GUTS’ TO ADMIT HE’S RUNNING SHADOW CAMPAIGN AGAINST BIDEN

Newsom insists he is not gunning to replace Biden. (Getty Images)

After Biden’s lackluster performance during the debate against Trump, Newsom assured reporters in the spin room that he remained firmly behind Biden, who has faced significant criticism even from members of his own party for a lackluster performance.

“I will never turn my back on President Biden,” Newsom said Thursday in a comment that appeared designed to dispel rumors that he’s running a shadow campaign. “I don’t know a Democrat in my party that would do so. And especially after tonight, we have his back.”

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

Newsom added: “I spent a lot of time with him. I know Joe Biden. I know what he’s accomplished in the last three and a half years. I know what he’s capable of. And I have no trepidations.”

Leading up to last week’s first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, Biden’s mental acuity became the center of political discourse last month after a bombshell Wall Street Journal report — which the White House dismissed — revealed that many lawmakers on Capitol Hill had questions about Biden’s mental acuity after many said his aging was apparent in private meetings.

Fox News Digital’s Paul Steinhauser and Bradford Betz contributed to this report.