The bar for Joe Biden to clear at yesterday’s NATO summit in Washington, DC could hardly have been set any lower. It was billed as a survive-or-die moment. His last-ditch opportunity to answer his increasingly vocal critics in the Democratic Party. To demonstrate to any doubters that his disastrous debate performance last month was a one-off, not a harbinger of his cognitive decline. All he had to do was speak clearly and coherently, without flubbing his lines, in front of fellow world leaders and the global press. And still he failed. Spectacularly.
The word ‘gaffe’ comes nowhere close to conveying the jaw-dropping, squirm-inducing, downright mortifying moment when the US president introduced President Volodomyr Zelensky of Ukraine – a man Biden described as having ‘as much courage as he has determination’ – as ‘President Putin’ of Russia. To have mixed a key US ally with the man who has violated his nation’s sovereignty, razed its cities to the ground and killed hundreds of thousands of innocents is no ordinary slip of the tongue. It was the most excruciating diplomatic clusterfuck of the century. And the president of the United States made it while he was still reading from an autocue.
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