NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE M y colleague Charles C. W. Cooke is correct: Joe Biden is a jerk.
After 50 years in public office, there’s an abundance of evidence demonstrating that Biden is a spiteful, petty, little man. He is a chronic liar and a self-serving career bureaucrat. He’s short-tempered, vindictive, and mean-spirited.
As notable as the president’s more contemptible qualities, but less discussed, is the fact that, among the public, some are apparently just now taking notice. It’s notable and scandalous precisely because their shock makes sense. For at least the past 15 years, the press has relentlessly promoted the myth that Biden is just a simple guy from Scranton, a big-hearted, plain-talkin’, empathetic grandpa. Major newsrooms have conditioned the public to believe in the “Uncle Joe” charade, which is astounding considering the press is uniquely aware it’s a persona concocted entirely from thin air. The real Joe Biden is a conniving, self-involved jerk. Journalists know this. The man has been on their radar for a half century.
There is no “Uncle Joe” without media complicity, and the fact that newsrooms helped the narrative to succeed, despite knowing full well it’s total nonsense, is a scandal. And as far as the press’s complicity in perpetuating the myth is concerned, the Obama years weren’t even the worst of it. Since the 2020 election, we’ve been treated to some of the most absurd, cloying public-relations work in all of Biden’s long, long career as a legislator.
“Biden’s empathy shapes policy, but some voters don’t feel it,” the Associated Press reported in February.
From Forbes in 2020: “How Empathy Defines Joe Biden.”
“Biden May Be Just the Person America Needs,” reads an Atlantic headline. Its subhead adds, “A president should connect with who we are, but also make us better than who we are.”
“Joe Biden’s biggest task is to be the USA’s Consoler-in-Chief,” declared the Telegraph. “The President-elect’s fortitude in the face of family tragedy has made him a figure of hope for a nation scarred by coronavirus.”
Journalists insist that Biden’s political superpower is his “empathy,” but he’s empathetic based on what incident or standard? As best one can tell, the evidence is the story Biden himself tells. Sure, Biden is free to believe his own story. But as the old saw in the news business goes, when your mother says she loves you, you need to check it out. Similarly, when the president tells you he’s a great person, maybe journalists ought to double-check his version of events against the public record.
It’s ol’ Lunch Bucket Joe! Ol’ Scranton Joe! What will America’s grandpa say today, that rascal?
A series of insults and expletives, apparently.
“Behind closed doors,” Axios, citing current and former Biden aides, reported last week, “Biden has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him. Some take a colleague, almost as a shield against a solo blast. The president’s admonitions include: ‘God dammit, how the fk don’t you know this?!,’ ‘Don’t fking bullsh*t me!’ and ‘Get the f**k out of here!’”
As a reminder, Biden bragged in 2021, “If you’re ever working with me and I hear you treat another with disrespect, I promise you I will fire you on the spot.”
Elsewhere last week, the president earned similarly unflattering coverage from the New York Times when longtime columnist Maureen Dowd took him to task for refusing to recognize his four-year-old granddaughter, Navy. Navy is the child of an affair between Hunter Biden and an Arkansas woman named Lunden Roberts. Biden has reportedly instructed aides that he has only six grandchildren, not seven.
“Joe Biden’s mantra has always been that ‘the absolute most important thing is your family,’” writes Dowd. “It is the heart of his political narrative. Empathy, born of family tragedies, has been his stock in trade. Callously scarring Navy’s life, just as it gets started, undercuts that.”
The columnist adds, “The president’s cold shoulder — and heart — is counter to every message he has sent for decades, and it’s out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead.”
At CNN, host Dana Bash took a predictable route, criticizing Republicans yet still recognizing the president’s casual cruelty, saying, “This is a story that is sad and disturbing on so many levels.”
“Yes,” she continued, “it is political for a couple of reasons. Number one, yes, Republicans are using it and are going to take advantage of it in a way that is unfortunate, inappropriate. But the reason they’re doing that is because of the brand and the kind of person that we all know and believe Joe Biden to be because it’s who he says he is. And it’s somebody who is a family man. That’s what we see all of the time.”
As a reminder, Biden bragged in 2020, “I’ve had a rule my entire life: No matter what’s happening, no matter how important the meeting, I’ll always answer a call from my grandchildren.” Terms and conditions may apply.
More seriously, the thing that’s especially revealing regarding Bash’s and Dowd’s reactions — bemoaning that Biden’s behavior seems so out of character for him — is that their impression of Joe Biden is informed entirely by Joe Biden. They believe he is an empathetic man for whom family comes before all else because, well, he said he is!
Look, it’d be one thing were Biden a new player on the scene, some fresh-faced kid from Scranton whose true character was still a mystery. Perhaps then the media naïveté could be excused. But Biden is hardly a recent arrival. He has been in Washington since the year Billie Jean King faced off against Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” exhibition tennis match. Biden has been acting like a jerk for decades, long before he became president. The press even covered much of it back in the day! It boggles the mind, then, that Biden, after demonstrating over the course of several years that he is, in fact, a jerk, was allowed in the mid-Aughts to reinvent himself, no questions asked. It boggles the mind that the newsrooms that had previously covered the president’s lousy temper and childish antics — to which they had a front-row seat — simply agreed to the reinvention of Joe Biden. Now it’s all ice-cream cones and walks on the beach and Ray-Bans.
Just ignore everything that came before the Uncle Joe era, including this incident from the campaign trail in 1987 in New Hampshire, as described by Charlie:
Asked by a voter . . . about his academic record, Biden grew unhinged. “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do,” he said, before rattling off a sequence of falsehoods that ought by rights to have ended his career. He said that he graduated in the top half of his law-school class. He did not. He said that he went to that law school on a “full academic scholarship.” He did not. He said that he “won the international moot-court competition,” “was the outstanding student in the political science department,” and “graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school.” None of that was true. In closing, Biden betrayed what the exchange was really about. “I’d be delighted to sit back and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like,” he jabbed.
Much later, during a campaign event in 2020, long after Biden had reinvented himself as the kindly grandpa, he threatened to slap a construction worker who accused him of trying to “end our Second Amendment right.”
“You’re full of sh**,” said Biden, sticking his finger in the man’s face.
The worker continued, saying in reference to the president’s anti-gun policies, “This is not okay, all right?”
“Don’t tell me that, pal,” said Biden, crowding into the man’s face, “or I’m going to go out and slap you in the face.”
“You’re working for me, man!” the worker responded.
“I’m not working for you,” Biden retorted. “Don’t be such a horse’s ass.”
Elsewhere that year, at a separate campaign event in Iowa, Biden called a man a “damn liar,” “fat,” and “too old to vote for me” after the man suggested the then-candidate used his influence as vice president to land his son, Hunter, a plush gig with a Ukrainian gas company. Biden also challenged the man to a push-up contest.
As a reminder, the “fat” and “You’re full of sh**” incidents happened as major media were publishing stories marveling over Biden’s supposed soft touch and empathy.
These incidents were not out of character for Biden. This is his character. We know this from current and former aides as well as the decades of Biden acting like this in public. To take the president at his word now, to believe he genuinely is empathetic and gentle, requires a willful ignorance or sheer gullibility.
Indeed, the story of who Biden pretends to be in public versus who he is behind closed doors is no more complicated than this: He woke up one morning and decided to remake his image into one of an ageing goofball empath, and the press, since at least 2007, decided to play along with the schtick for partisan reasons. That some in the press also appear surprised now by Biden’s lack of character just adds to the absurdity of the situation. The public’s general ignorance on the issue can be explained; they have the media to thank for that. But the Dowds and Bashes of the world have no excuse for being surprised that Biden’s personal and public personas don’t match up. Their industry played a key role in the discrepancy!
To put things into context, imagine if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Marjorie Taylor Greene woke up one day and announced “I’m a moderate,” a legislator bent on consensus, and the press simply nodded and said, “Okay, you’re a moderate now,” ignoring entirely her path to Congress as a partisan guttersnipe. Imagine then that Ocasio-Cortez 2.0 or Greene 2.0 acted exactly like the original, and all the Dana Bashes of the world put finger to chin and exclaimed, “This isn’t like her! She told us she was a moderate!”
It’d be pretty silly, right?
To its credit, Axios recognizes that Biden’s empathy routine is just that, a routine.
The president’s “private eruptions paint a more complicated picture of Biden as a manager and president than his carefully cultivated image as a kindly uncle who loves Aviator sunglasses and ice cream,” the newsgroup reports.
Moreover, Axios quotes former Biden campaign and Senate aide Jeff Connaughton, who says the president “hides his sharper edge to promote his folksy Uncle Joe image — which is why, when flashes of anger break through, it seems so out of public character.”
Like the glossy Kennedy “Camelot” nonsense, Biden’s “empathy” is a myth. It makes sense that, like Jackie Onassis, he’d fabricate a self-serving narrative of this sort. It’s good retail politics, and Biden has never been shy about lying for personal gain.
But what’s the press’s excuse for playing along?