After going off-script to declare that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” during a March speech in Warsaw, Joe Biden fumed that his aides had infantilized him by walking back his comments, according to an excerpt of a new book released Wednesday.
“Biden instantly knew that the White House would have to clarify his mistake. By the time Biden piled into the motorcade. His aides had released a statement walking back his sentence,” Franklin Foer writes in his forthcoming biography of Biden’s first term in the White House, The Last Politician, excerpted in Axios.
“Biden left for home, ending his triumphalist tour, feeling sorry for himself,” Foer continues. “Rather than owning his failure, he fumed to his friends about how he was treated like a toddler. Was John Kennedy ever babied like that?”
Biden’s improvised comments about Putin put a damper on his entire feel-good European tour, in which he met with NATO and European Union allies against the backdrop of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. “The President's point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin's power in Russia, or regime change,” a White House official clarified shortly after Biden’s comments.
The revelation comes on the heels of another damning admission by Foer, a writer for the Atlantic, who had a different excerpt of his book published on Tuesday focused on the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“Biden didn't have time to voraciously consume the news, but he was well aware of the coverage, and it infuriated him. It did little to change his mind, though,” Foer writes following the debacle removing American forces from the embattled country after nearly two decades of war.
“The criticism of the withdrawal caused him [Biden] to justify the chaos as the inevitable consequence of a difficult decision, even though he had never publicly, or privately, predicted it. Through the whole last decade of the Afghan War, he had detested the conventional wisdom of the foreign-policy elites,” Foer continues.
“They were willing to stay forever, no matter the cost.”
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