There’s a lot of hubub about an Axios report this week that Joe Biden can sometimes get cranky with his staff.
Behind closed doors, Biden has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him. Some take a colleague, almost as a shield against a solo blast.
The president's admonitions include: "God dammit, how the f**k don't you know this?!," "Don't f**king bullsh*t me!" and "Get the f**k out of here!" — according to current and former Biden aides who have witnessed and been on the receiving end of such outbursts.
Why it matters: The private eruptions paint a more complicated picture of Biden as a manager and president than his carefully cultivated image as a kindly uncle who loves Aviator sunglasses and ice cream.
Folks on the right are gleeful. Here’s Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review:
He’s an asshole. Can we not all see it? For those who cannot conceive of truth without triangulation, I will freely stipulate that Donald Trump is an asshole, too — and that, in some ways, he’s an even worse one. But that does not let Biden off the hook. President or not, Biden is a decrepit, dishonest, unpleasant blowhard. He’s a nasty, corrupt, partisan fraud. He is, as Shakespeare had it, “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” Biden is twice as irritating as he believes himself to be, and half as intelligent into the bargain. From the moment he arrived on the scene — nearly 50 years ago, Lord help us — he has represented all that is wrong with our politics. A century hence, his name will be set into aspic and memorialized under “Hack.”
That’s … a lot.
Listen, I don’t know what Joe Biden is like behind closed doors and probably you don’t either. But Cooke’s equivocation between Biden and Trump misses something important. Let’s grant, hypothetically, that the two men roughly equal in their asshole quotient.: Cooke’s admission that Trump is “in some ways … even worse” still elides how those ways matter.
Biden might be a jerk in private. For Trump — and the party he leads — being a jerk is the animating spirit of the public mission.
Hypocrisy is the tribute that virtue pays to vice. If Biden is a really big jerk, he at least has the good graces to try not to play a jerk on TV. (He fails sometimes.)
Trump, on the other hand, became president largely because he played a jerk on TV. He enhanced his fame by telling some poor shlub “You’re fired” every week on a reality show that didn’t correspond all that much to his actual reality. He launched his presidential campaign. He launched his original presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.” You know the litany, I don’t have to repeat it.
But it’s not just a Trump thing. Very often, the GOP leans into “but he fights!” and “owning the libs” as its central rationales. Right-wing thinkers sniffily dismiss “virtue signaling” in favor of a more pugilistic politics.
Trump is a jerk, both publicly and privately, and he’s helped make the whole point of Republican politics to be as jerky as possible. Biden dons aviator glasses and eats ice cream in public and also sometimes yells at staff in private.
Which do you think is better for the country? Which approach makes this a better place to live? And which approach encourages us to constantly be terrible to each other?
Matt Yglesias, I think, gets this right — and with the perfect example:
Maybe Joe Biden is an a-hole. I don’t really know. It wouldn’t surprise me. You probably have to have some a-hole in you to be a national level politician — the level of narcissism it takes to think the American people should look to you for leadership is pretty astounding. And I’ll note here that Biden doesn’t suffer for his a-hole qualities the way, say, a woman senator in a similar situation would.
But if Biden is an a-hole, being an a-hole isn’t his ideology or his whole selling point to voters. And that matters.
I don't know why anyone would be surprised by him being an a**hole. You don't get to be president of anything - a country, a corporation, an HOA - by being a nice guy.
Good piece. It’s one thing to be an asshole, and be embarrassed about it. It’s another thing to be an asshole and make it your brand.