Vice President Kamala Harris, meeting French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Nov. 10, didn’t talk about the controversial tripartite AUKUS defensive pact that cost France a $66 billion deal to sell submarines to Australia.
It’s probably best that she didn’t because it was a disaster when her boss did in October. President Joe Biden told Macron, “I was under the impression that France had been informed long before” the pact that was revealed in September.
Biden’s claim was a blunder on several levels. It tainted Australia with seeming dishonesty, an undeserved reward for its brave diplomatic risk scrapping the deal to join forces with the U.S. and U.K. It also exposed Biden to later evidence that he was fibbing because he knew perfectly well that France had been kept in the dark.
Biden’s attempt at a confess-and-avoid defense also stoked a persistent concern — that he doesn’t know what his administration is doing. The rollout of a multilateral military pact to contain China was done without him being made aware of the details? Seriously?
What does that say about our federal government? It reveals that people other than the elected leader are making the decisions and pulling the strings behind the White House curtain. Sen. Lindsey Graham told me eight months ago of Biden, “Clearly, he’s not in charge.”
The president himself keeps making this plain. It is not a critic’s accusation but confessions from the man himself that put this up in neon over the White House. Biden denied a report that was clearly well-sourced, that his administration might make $450,000 payments to each illegal immigrant separated from family members by former President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance policy at the border. But the president’s denials were quickly diluted by his communications shop, which said that, actually, the payments might proceed, and sought to cover up Biden’s obliviousness by saying he was disputing only the dollar number, not the underlying policy, when he called the original report “garbage.”
Hair-splitting is unconvincing. Biden simply looks as though he either forgets or is not informed what “his” policies are.
Even on seemingly trivial matters such as whether to talk to reporters on set occasions, the president makes it plain that although, constitutionally, all executive authority flows from him, he is not free to do what he thinks best. He has told reporters, “I’m not supposed to take any questions.” Supposed? Who says?
When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited him in the Oval Office and started answering media questions extemporaneously, Biden’s aides stepped in to shut the impromptu press conference down, shooing reporters away and angrily suggesting later that Johnson stepped out of line. They are terrified of their boss straying off script and flubbing the spin.
Which is worse — that people other than Biden might be pulling the strings of the administration, or that the strings are hanging loosely by themselves and flapping in the wind?
Either way, it’s little wonder that confidence in the president and his administration has collapsed.
