The sexy part of this NBC scoop is the infighting between Biden and his aides, part of a theme today about unhappiness inside the White House.

But don’t miss the deeper point of the story. The president sees a Republican landslide coming, he’s exasperated by his inability to stop it, so he’s begun to pass the buck. To his staff, to fickle voters, even to fate. “He’s now lower than Trump, and he’s really twisted about it,” said one person close to the White House about Biden’s bafflement at his low approval rating.

One point of contention inside the building is the constant scramble to clean up his gaffes. It *does* feel like his aides are forever “correcting” things he says off the cuff. Although maybe that’s because he’s forever saying incorrect things off the cuff.

Biden doesn’t have the faintest idea what he is talking about. 9 mm?pic.twitter.com/T9qThAObE9

— James Hirsen (@thejimjams) May 31, 2022

They haven’t cleaned that one up (yet), possibly because it’s so in tune with Democrats’ confiscatory impulses about guns. But 9mm bullets aren’t a freakishly powerful form of ammo; they’re the most commonly purchased caliber in the U.S., popular with owners of handguns. If he wants to go after the 9mm, he’s aiming for broad-based disarmament. Which isn’t going to happen.

The White House did clean up another remark he made offhandedly to reporters yesterday. We won’t be sending Ukraine any rocket systems that can reach deep into Russia, the president said. But longer-range systems are precisely what the Ukrainians have been begging for, not because they plan to attack across the border but because it will allow them to bombard Russian forces in the Donbas from further away. Time for a walkback:

The senior White House official has provided me with the following clarification of President Biden's statement: "#MLRS systems remain under consideration, but nothing is on the table with long-range strike capabilities (beyond battlefield use)." https://t.co/1TbQbHITs8

— Misha Komadovsky (@komadovsky) May 30, 2022

Biden’s getting tired of it, says NBC:

Beyond policy, Biden is unhappy about a pattern that has developed inside the West Wing. He makes a clear and succinct statement — only to have aides rush to explain that he actually meant something else. The so-called clean-up campaign, he has told advisers, undermines him and smothers the authenticity that fueled his rise. Worse, it feeds a Republican talking point that he’s not fully in command.

The issue came to a head when Biden ad-libbed during a speech in Poland that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.” Within minutes, Biden’s aides tried to walk back his comments, saying he hadn’t called for Putin’s removal and that U.S. policy was unchanged. Biden was furious that his remarks were being seen as unreliable, arguing that he speaks genuinely and reminding his staff that he’s the one who is president.

It does feed the perception that he’s not fully in command, doesn’t it? Although not as much as when he half-jokes to reporters that he’s not “supposed to” take any of their questions. Multiple relatives have flagged comments like that to me as evidence that Biden’s more of a prop than a president now. The problem is of his own making.

It’s also of his own making insofar as he sometimes participates in the clean-up of his own remarks. Remember when he said in Warsaw that Putin can’t remain in power? The White House comms team rushed out a statement afterward clarifying that the president isn’t calling for regime change in Russia. The next time Biden spoke to the media, he signed on to that spin. “I want to make it clear, I wasn’t then, nor am I now articulating a policy change. I was expressing the moral outrage that I feel and I make no apologies for it,” he said on March 28.

The same thing happened with his recent remarks about Taiwan. Once again he was speaking overseas and seemed to let the moment get the better of him, talking tough in Tokyo by insisting that the United States would defend Taiwan if it’s attacked by China. But that’s not official U.S. policy. Our policy for decades has been one of “strategic ambiguity,” neither ruling out defending Taiwan nor pledging to do so for fear of antagonizing China. Had U.S. policy now changed? Nope, said the president once he was back home in the U.S. Same policy as ever. (Never mind that he’s said several times in other interviews that the U.S. has made a formal commitment to defend Taiwan, which we have not.)

If he wants to change U.S. foreign policy, he’s entitled to do so. If he wants to stick with the current policy, he can do that too. But his habit of trying to do both and then blaming his staff reeks of buck-passing.

As does this bit from the NBC story:

Biden is annoyed that he wasn’t alerted sooner about the baby formula shortage and that he got his first briefing in the past month, even though the crisis had long been in the making. (The White House didn’t specify when Biden got his first briefing on the formula shortage.) His nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Robert Califf, told Congress last week that the agency was sluggish and that it had made “suboptimal” decisions as parents hunted for formula on empty store shelves.

That’s a curious grievance for the president to have after he claimed a few weeks ago that only “mind readers” could have foreseen a baby-formula shortage that was many months in the making. Maybe he realized afterward that parents had been grumbling about it for awhile, long before the crisis moment arrived when Abbott’s plant was temporarily shut, and that his staff had awakened to the problem far too late.

Or maybe he’s just frustrated by his unpopularity and eager to find scapegoats. Among his other complaints, NBC claims, are Democrats not defending him on TV enough (a Trumpy lament), voters not giving him credit for the economic recovery at a moment when inflation is cannibalizing their incomes, and even the fact that he “just can’t catch a break.” It’s true that many of his problems were beyond the reach of the presidency to prevent — disruptions to the supply chain, war in Ukraine, an endless series of new COVID subvariants. But the big one, the one that’s going to wreck his majorities in Congress, certainly was partly his doing. And it’s not going away anytime soon.

Exit question via Kyle Smith: If Biden really is in command at the White House, why doesn’t he fire some of these staffers who keep contradicting him?