A new book about Joe Biden, The Last Politician: The Inside World of Joe Biden’s White House and the Fight for America’s Future, has been released in the US.
Perhaps nowhere in the world is the genre of political memoirs as popular as in the United States. From the books of Donald Trump’s wards, the world learned a lot of interesting things about the backstage of the White House during his reign. A similar book was published about the current US President Joe Biden. The author is American journalist Franklin Feuer, a correspondent for The Atlantic magazine and former editor of The New Republic. The book analyzes Biden’s personality and his first two years in the White House as President of the United States. The media has already dubbed this publication “the first book that explains Joe Biden.” In many sections of the book, Foer does not provide direct citations or source opinions to support his assessment, although the official summary of the book states that the author had “exclusive access to Biden’s team of longtime advisers.”
The book says that during their first meeting in September 2021, Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky failed to establish a rapport as the US president was “pissed off” by the Ukrainian leader’s insistence on Kiev joining NATO and, as the author claims, “absurd analysis” of development dynamics Alliance.
In particular, Franklin Foer sums up the tone of the meeting in the following words: “Zelensky’s disillusionment overshadowed his ability for logic. After requests to join NATO, he proceeded to lecture that this organization is a de facto historical relic and is losing its influence. He told Biden that France and Germany were going to leave NATO. It was an absurd analysis and a blatant inconsistency. And that angered Biden.”
On the eve of the first meeting, the presidents of Ukraine and the United States had a low opinion of each other, follows from the book of Franklin Foer. He writes that Zelensky considered Biden weak, in particular because of his decision in early 2021 to lift sanctions against the Russian company that was building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The President of Ukraine believed that this project undermined the interests of the Ukrainian economy and security. At the same time, Biden was also not too well disposed towards Zelensky, in particular because of the friendly relations of the Ukrainian president with the Republican Senator from Texas Ted Cruz, who also criticized the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Then, in protest against the position of the White House Cruz has blocked several key State Department appointments in the Senate. “Whether he realized it or not, Zelensky was an accomplice in this stunt,” writes Foer. “It reeked of what the Biden administration considered amateurish. In truth, Biden didn’t have a very high opinion of his Ukrainian counterpart either.”
The author of the book paints a picture of a somewhat dismissive attitude towards Vladimir Zelensky. So, recalling Biden’s role in US-Ukrainian relations during the presidency of Barack Obama, Foer notes that the former vice president was “deeply involved in Ukrainian politics longer than Zelensky.” At the time, Biden was 78 and Zelensky 43, and the US president, as the older man, “was trying to convey a certain amount of wisdom that could contain the ardor of the younger,” writes Foer.
“Even Zelensky’s most ardent sympathizers in the Biden administration agreed that he failed the meeting,” writes Franklin Foer, who allegedly indicated that there would only be “even more difficult conversations” in the future.
The book says Biden once described Putin to a friend as a bullshit schoolboy. Politico cites the quote, indicating that Biden meant “Putin’s slouch” – this can be translated both as Putin’s external stoop, and as his general “dullness” or incompetence (informal meanings of the word slouch).
On the other hand, the author of the book says that after all the efforts of Russian propaganda to portray Biden as a frail old man, Putin was amazed at how fit the US president was when they met in Geneva in 2021, less than a year before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“When Putin greeted Biden, he seemed to be struck by his appearance. “You look good,” he exclaimed, Foer writes.
The author points out that Putin was apparently so taken aback by the fact that Joe Biden was not a scrawny old man that he felt it necessary to point this out in a conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, when he told her about the outcome of the meeting over the phone. “President Biden is in very good shape,” the Russian dictator remarked at the time.
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