Joe Biden may want you to believe that he’s different from Donald Trump, but in an interview with Time magazine, recorded on May 28 and published on June 4, he sounded an awful lot like Trump in his self-centered self-promotion. In effect, Biden was saying over and over again, “America is great and I did it!”
“We are, we are the world power. And what I inherited, as a consequence of the mistake that we made in Afghanistan is a—was not a loss in Afghanistan,” he said early in the interview, going on to differentiate himself from Trump. “I really believe that we have a values-based as well as practical-based alliances around the world,” which Trump, he said, wanted to abandon.
Secondly, “NATO is considerably stronger than it was when I took office. I put it together. Not only did I reestablish the fact that it was the strongest alliance in the history of the world, I was able to expand it. While I was in one of the G7 meetings in Europe. When I got back I called on the President of Finland because when I had met earlier in the year with Putin, he said he wanted to see the Finlandization of NATO. I told him, he’s gonna get not the Finlandization, the Natoization of Finland.
“And guess what? I did it. I did it. And we’re now the strongest nation. We have the strongest alliance in all of America, all of history. In the meantime, what we keep skipping over is what the consequence of the success of Russia in Ukraine would be. That’s why I brought this along (referring to a speech that Russian President Vladimir Putin made on Feb. 21, 2022 that he waved around earlier). You probably haven’t read it. Most people haven’t read it. He says this is part of reestablishing the Soviet Union.” For the record, Putin said no such thing. In fact, he was highly critical of the Soviet system which, he argued, contained within it the seeds of its own eventual collapse.
And what does peace look like in Ukraine? “Peace looks like making sure Russia never, never, never, never occupies Ukraine,” Biden said. “That’s what peace looks like. And it doesn’t mean NATO, they are part of NATO.”
The interview then goes on to Israel, about which he seemed to be unable to say anything coherent, and to China, mostly about the trade war that Trump started but Biden has continued, and Taiwan. He refused to rule out military force to “defend” Taiwan but was ambiguous about deploying U.S. ground troops there.
But regardless, Biden clearly considers himself the greatest President ever. “ Look, name me a President that’s gotten as much done as I’ve gotten done in my first three and a half years,” he said, referring to numerous giant pieces of legislation that he claims credit for getting through Congress.
