Balancing campaign Biden and White House Biden

Continued use of TikTok highlights juggling act

WASHINGTON — President Biden just signed a bill that could ban himself from using TikTok. But Biden plans to keep using TikTok until his new law forces him off it.

His political team in Wilmington, Del., after all, considers TikTok a vital tool to reach young voters who could be crucial to his chances of winning reelection this fall. The problem is that his national security team in Washington considers the Chinese-owned social media site a threat to America that should be banned if it is not sold.

Reconciling those two imperatives left Biden’s government and campaign advisers laboring Wednesday to explain the competing rationales. But it is not the only time that Campaign Joe and Foreign Policy Joe have been at odds in recent months. Campaign Joe tells stories on the trail that Foreign Policy Joe’s staff then has to clean up — or try to ignore as best as possible. Campaign Joe prefers blunt talk. Foreign Policy Joe has to worry about diplomacy.

The disconnect is hardly unprecedented in an election year. Every president seeking a second term finds himself juggling two different jobs with two different imperatives at the same time: running the country and running for office. A candidate is focused on firing up supporters and tearing down the other side. A commander in chief has to worry about what might be best for the nation, even if it is not necessarily best for his electoral chances.

Still, the disparity between Wilmington and Washington has been on display lately. When former president Donald Trump hosted Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate and club, Biden’s Delawarebased campaign assailed Orban as “a dictator.” The White House, however, refused to use that term for a NATO ally.

Just last week, Biden told two campaign audiences that after being shot down during World War II, his uncle might have been eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea. Unsurprisingly, that rather peeved the island nation’s leaders at a time when the president has been courting them as part of his Indo-Pacific strategy.

“Like most effective incumbent presidents, President Biden can navigate doing two things at once: being commander in chief, and barnstorming the battlegrounds, taking his popular and historic agenda to the voters who will decide this election,” Kevin Munoz, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. “It’s a stark contrast to Trump, who couldn’t manage the day job when he was in office and can’t seem to wake up to the fact that he’s running on a deeply toxic agenda that will lose him the election again this November.”

Problematic offhand remarks have long been a challenge for Biden, who once called himself “a gaffe machine.” Campaigns result in more opportunities to go off script than speaking off a teleprompter in the East Room, so the White House cleanup squad invariably has a surge in business at this point in the electoral cycle.

It was at a campaign fundraiser last year that Biden referred to President Xi Jinping of China as “a dictator” — just a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken had met with Xi in Beijing in an effort to smooth over friction in the US-Chinese relationship. When Biden was later asked at a news conference if he would still call Xi a dictator, he said, “Well, look — he is,” and Blinken, sitting nearby, appeared to wince.

Not that anyone in Washington would privately dispute that Xi is a dictator. But as a matter of timing, saying it out loud complicated Blinken’s diplomacy. As it happens, Blinken seems to have remarkable timing when it comes to these things. Where was the secretary Wednesday when Biden signed the TikTok legislation? He had just landed in Beijing for more talks with Chinese leaders.

Orban is another leader widely considered a dictator in Washington. But because he leads a treaty ally of the United States, official criticism of his policies cracking down on democracy is usually more measured.

Not so when Orban met with Trump last month. “Donald Trump is kicking off the general election” by welcoming rogues like “Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban,” the Biden campaign said in an emailed statement. Biden himself, at a later campaign stop, did not go quite that far but referred to Orban as someone “looking for dictatorship.”