Watch out, world: if you follow Sleepy Joe you’ll only end up getting lost
DID JOE Biden really fall asleep during his press conference with Naftali Bennett? A clip is circulating in which, midway through Bennett’s encomium to the specialness of the Israeli-American relationship, the man Donald Trump called “Sleepy Joe” appears to close his eyes and drop his head in a convincing impersonation of an oldtimer taking a power nap. Bennett, as if registering that he’s lost Biden’s attention, then turns away from the President and delivers the rest of his speech to the room.
The clip is edited to deceive. It doesn’t show what happens next. Biden opens his eyes, raises his head and says: “Thank you, but you’ve given me credit, much of which should go to Barack Obama, for making sure that we committed to the qualitative edge you would have relative to your friends in the region.”
It’s not surprising that people edit clips out of political malice: politics brings out the scoundrel in everyone, especially the politicians. And it’s good that outlets like CNN hurried to debunk this one – not least because CNN was prominent among those outlets which, when Biden was running for office, stigmatised any questions about his mental and physical fitness as fake news, mad Trumpery, or offences leading to disinvitation from the right parties, which, when it comes to the American media, are left-leaning parties.
What’s strange is that so many of the debunkers felt it necessary to argue that Biden hadn’t just zoned out – not a sacking offense, unless you’re a bus driver – but that his mind had in fact been fully engaged all the time.
“Biden was, in fact, wide awake – alert enough to make a cutting remark,” Allison Kaplan Sommer affirmed in Haaretz. Other fearless seekers of the truth pointed out that Biden’s hands had moved while his head was down, so there were definite signs of life.
Biden’s response was cutting – but it was also off-track. First, Bennett had praised Biden as a lifelong friend of Israel. Then he had praised the U.S. and Israel: “Both of us… seek to do good and need to be strong, both of us… are a lighthouse in a very, very stormy world.”
Biden’s response didn’t address any of this. His apparent inability to reply to two-part questions was noted during the 2020 presidential debates, and he didn’t attempt to engage with both halves of Bennett’s statement here either.
Instead, he threw the compliment back in Bennett’s face. This also fits Biden’s pattern.
Biden had tried the same trick the day before, at his disastrous press conference after suicide bombers had killed 13 Americans and dozens more Afghans. That time, the President was lost for words and fell silent before the guy from Fox News. Biden crumpled at the lectern in a posture suggesting a Rodin sculpture, perhaps “Man with a bad temper trying to control himself”, or “Man praying for forgiveness for closing Bagram airport”, or “Man simply giving up”.
A few days before that, Biden had told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he considered America’s obligations to Taiwan to be the same as its mutual defence pact with other NATO members. Some nameless mouthpiece of the State Department scrambled to assure the media that Biden “misspoke” – before China scrambles more of its aircraft, which have logged a record number of intrusions into Taiwan’s airspace this year.
Biden “misspeaks” every time he goes off-script. He didn’t fall asleep in front of Bennett, but he wandered off. He did the same at Dover Airforce Base, at the ceremonial unloading of the bodies of the dead Americans from Kabul. While he was supposed to be honouring America’s sacrifice, he checked his watch. And that clip isn’t edited at all.
Biden also wandered off when he recently got lost walking from his helicopter to the White House, apparently oblivious to corrections from his security detail. Whatever Naftali Bennett said to the cameras after his meeting at the White House, he will know that if you follow someone who doesn’t know where’s he’s going, you too will get lost.
But Biden wasn’t just covering his wandering attention when he flipped the question on Bennett. This administration hasn’t forgotten Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign against the Iran Deal and his address to Congress. It hasn’t forgotten how Netanyhu paid lip service to the two-state solution in Washington while undoing it at home. And it won’t forget that Bennett, a pro-annexationist who served in Netanyahu coalitions from 2013 to 2020, was part of that bait-and-switch. After Kabul, the U.S. is heading home in disarray. Israel is about to be reminded it’s not a friend, but an interest, and that the Democrats especially aren’t that interested in its security or specialness.