As discussed at length in today’s Morning Jolt, last night President Biden told Democratic donors at the Manhattan home of James and Kathryn Murdoch that the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is at the highest level since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, because of the war in Ukraine.
This morning, the White House released Biden’s schedule for the day. He will tour Volvo Group Powertrain Operations in Hagerstown, Md., shortly after noon, and then give remarks on “building the economy.” From there Biden will travel to Philadelphia, and then he will go to Wilmington, Del., where he will remain over the weekend.
Does that seem like the schedule of a president who is facing down “Armageddon”?
We’ve all gotten used to Biden blurting out cringe-inducing things that don’t make a lot of sense, whether it’s wondering where a deceased congresswoman is, or claiming that he used to drive a tractor-trailer, or rambling about how many interracial couples he sees in commercials these days, or that he “was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically,” or that oil slicks on car windshields gave him cancer, and so on.
But the one last night is different. The president — the lone American official with the authority to launch nuclear weapons — isn’t supposed to just casually mention that the world could be headed to a world-ending nuclear exchange, in between requests for donations at a party fundraiser. A president’s words carry weight in a way that a vice president’s or a senator’s do not, and as Phil Klein observed in April, Biden just can’t make the adjustment. Maybe Biden was just venting his anxieties. Perhaps the most troubling interpretation is that Biden’s most recent briefing from the intelligence community included something particularly ominous.
Either way, the message from the White House today seems to be a very Emily Litella-esque “never mind.”