President Joe Biden is getting a raw deal in the conservative press, according to New York Times White House correspondent Michael Shear.
“In three days of diplomacy in Asia, President Biden rallied world leaders to help finance poor nations, fortified the coalition backing Ukraine and struck a deal with Vietnam to counter Chinese aggression,” read the lead paragraph outlining Biden’s Herculean achievements in Southeast Asia. “But even before he left Vietnam on Sunday night, the president was hammered with a very different narrative.”
What follows is a near-pristine example of scene-setting designed to distract you from the dramaturgy that occurred on stage — the article even includes the clichéd invocation of Republicans’ sordid habit of seizing on events that reflect poorly on Democratic lawmakers.
By Monday morning, as the 80-year-old president was flying home on Air Force One, conservative media outlets had seized on his end-of-trip news conference as the latest evidence that he is too old to perform on the world stage.
It is a pattern that infuriates the White House, where Mr. Biden’s top aides believe that stories about the president’s age and health are stoked by his enemies in an effort to undermine his accomplishments.
It’s only at this point that the author concedes that almost all of the Right’s observations about Biden’s performance are correct.
It’s true that Joe Biden “rambled into a familiar story about liars in a John Wayne movie, which left some in the audience deeply perplexed,” Shear admitted. There can be no doubt that the president “also struggled to read from notecards that listed the names of reporters to call on for questions.” No one disputes that Biden was cut off almost mid-sentence by his own staff amid a Q&A with reporters before being nudged off stage amid a rising crescendo of music, though Shear cast this observation as “typical” insofar as it was attributed to the conservative tabloid Daily Mail.
To these admissions, Shear invites a chorus of loyal Democrats and administration officials to respond, most of whom complained of how conservative media figures had distorted Biden’s conduct during other unrelated events. None, however, disputed the Right’s characterization of this event. It is at this point, deep in the copy, that the truth can at last be told: “Still,” Shear admits, “for any president, the performance at the news conference in Vietnam would not have ranked among the best.”
And yet, Donald Trump has himself “delivered rambling” speeches, “ranted” unaccountably, and produced “anger-filled diatribes” that often “made little sense.”
“By that standard, Mr. Biden was more capable,” the Times reporter concludes.
Between the Republican pouncing, the excuse-making, and the non-sequiturs designed to draw Donald Trump into a conversation in which he has no justifiable purpose other than to create the only favorable contrast from which Joe Biden can benefit, this Times report is an exquisite specimen. Even the headline — “Biden’s News Conference in Vietnam Ignites His Opponents” — is pitch-perfect. It belongs in a museum.