DISPATCHES FROM THE PALACE GUARD MEDIA:
Asked if he can do the job at 85 years old (which he would be in a second term), Biden tells TIME:
“I can do it better than anybody you know. You’re looking at me, I can take you too.”https://t.co/4cklIYuak9 pic.twitter.com/9SrdASoaMD
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) June 4, 2024
Long before he entered his dotage, Joe Biden has spent his entire career insulting and belittling journalists – and curiously, they all just sit there and take it, instead of proving that they’re not his party’s operatives with bylines.
But Time’s problem is that Biden is so far gone, there’s only so much they can do to keep propping him up: The Transcript From Biden’s Interview With Time Is a Mess.
“For example, the idea that if when Putin decided to go into Russia,” Biden said at one point before correcting himself. “I mean, he’s gonna go from Russia into Ukraine—the reason why I cleared the intelligence so we can release the information we knew that he was going to attack, was to let the world know we were still in charge.” Biden conveniently omitted — and TIME did not raise — the Biden administration’s intelligence sharing with the Chinese Communist Party in a failed attempt to have Beijing talk Putin out of invading.
Biden repeatedly mixed up Russia with Ukraine throughout his comments on the subject. He also mixed up Iraq and Iran at points, including his refutation of “the idea that you had nuclear arsenals in Iran, that were being, I mean, in Iraq…” At another point, Biden confused Taiwan with South Korea. Biden also said that America has “the strongest alliance in all of America,” before correcting his claim to “all of history.”
The interview also saw Biden trail off a number of times, ending an assertion about being “on a slippery slope for war if we don’t do something about Ukraine” with “It’s just not gonna…anyway…,” according to TIME’s transcript.
When asked about Israel’s prosecution of the war started by Hamas on October 7, Biden said “I’m not going to respond to that because I’m about to make a…anyway.” He’s about to make a anyway, folks.
Even TIME struggled to determine what the president said, having to insert admissions of transcription defeat at points such as this in the interview: “Hamas could say (unintelligible) and done period,” and again later: “You know, I don’t have any (unintelligible)…”
Exit question: “Look, the buck stops with Biden, but what are his handlers doing by putting him in these situations? And this happened with one of the most friendly outlets out there. Imagine what he’s going to look like at the debates if he gets even the slightest amount of pushback from a moderator. Biden is senile, and those around him are too scared to keep him out of the spotlight. That’s a bad combination.”