Managing the fall guy is proving difficult.
Old Joe Biden has been pretending to be president of the United States for a year and a half now. While it has never been entirely certain who exactly is in charge (Barack Obama and White House chief of staff Ron Klain are two of the candidates most commonly bruited about), Old Joe himself has made it clear many times that it he isn’t, saying on numerous occasions that he is going to “get in trouble” with unnamed people if he departs from the instructions they have given him. That’s why it was all the more surprising on Tuesday when NBC News revealed that Biden is angry about White House aides constantly walking back his statements when they’re wacky, inaccurate, incendiary, or dangerous. Does he actually think he is president of the United States after all?
Biden has many times intimated that he is not the man who is calling the shots, and knows it. In June 2021 at the G7 Summit, he said, “I’m sorry, I’m going to get in trouble with staff if I don’t do this the right way.” At a press conference in Nov. 2021, he gave the impression that someone had directed him not to take too many questions: “I can take…I’m going to get in real trouble…this is the last question I’m taking.”
On Sept. 8, 2021, Biden announced to the world, “I‘m supposed to stop and walk out of the room.” On Aug. 30, 2021, he told a reporter, “I’m not supposed to take any questions, but go ahead.” But when the question turned out to involve his catastrophic mishandling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said: “I’m not gonna answer Afghanistan now,” and summarily walked away.