The Corner

White House

A Rambling Man

President Joe Biden speaks at a press conference during NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington, D.C., July 11, 2024. (Leah Millis/Reuters)

Today on The Editors, Rich asked Maddy about Biden’s strange tendency to trail off and leave all his sentences ending with “anyway. . .” Rich pointed out that while Biden “started doing that in 2020” because his advisers said he “shouldn’t talk so much,” “now the anyway just seems like he doesn’t know how he would possibly land the plane of his answers anymore.”

Maddy agreed, saying that “even in his prime, Biden was a rambler. He was certainly somebody who was prone to gaffes . . . but this is different.”

Biden had two major gaffes before and during the press conference, the first of which being when he referred to Ukraine’s leader as President Putin, and the second being when he referred to “Vice President Trump.” He corrected himself the first time, but not the second.  Maddy said that attending officials were obviously nervous while Biden was speaking: “Clearly, everybody’s on the edge of their seat, and the best that they can hope for, to quote a New Yorker headline, is ‘a less than awful performance.'”

“Since when was that the standard for the highest office in American life, the most important leader of the free world?”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Sarah Schutte is the podcast manager for National Review and an associate editor for National Review magazine. Originally from Dayton, Ohio, she is a children's literature aficionado and Mendelssohn 4 enthusiast.
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