Campaign season is truly upon us. This weekend, President Joe Biden left the White House to rally the Democratic Party base and other constituents on whose behalf he’s spent the past two years working, getting them fired up and organized for what will be a fierce election contest. No, he wasn’t barnstorming the key Rustbelt states where for the past two elections, the swing of a few tens of thousands of votes have effectively decided the result. Rather, he was hobnobbing with one hundred fifty ultrarich party donors at a luxury hotel in Washington, DC.

It was a marked exception in the president’s schedule. Biden has spent most of his weekends as president outside of DC, at one of his two homes in Delaware or at Camp David in rural Maryland. So far this year, he’s spent a full twelve weekends without doing any public events and has only attended a dozen public events that were scheduled after 6 p.m., many of which were meetings with foreign leaders.

Clearly, this meeting was a high priority for the embattled president, who gave his gratitude to the assembled oligarchs and made clear he saw them as the backbone of his political ascent. “It’s because of you, I’m standing here. And it’s because of you, we’re going to win this time around,” Biden reportedly told the collection of one-percenters over a dinner of “roasted beetroot salad, prime New York strip loin with tiger shrimp, and orange mousse cake,” according to NBC.