{"id":28488,"date":"2022-05-23T17:08:01","date_gmt":"2022-05-23T17:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/?p=28488"},"modified":"2022-05-23T17:08:01","modified_gmt":"2022-05-23T17:08:01","slug":"my-lunch-with-president-biden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/2022\/05\/23\/my-lunch-with-president-biden\/","title":{"rendered":"My lunch with President Biden"},"content":{"rendered":"
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President Joe Biden invited me for lunch at the White House last Monday. But it was all off the record \u2014 so I can\u2019t tell you anything he said.<\/h5>\n<\/div>\n
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I can, though, tell you two things \u2014 what I ate and how I felt after. I ate a tuna salad sandwich with tomato on whole wheat bread, with a bowl of mixed fruit and a chocolate milkshake for dessert that was so good it should have been against the law.<\/p>\n

What I felt afterward was this: For all you knuckleheads on Fox who say that Biden can\u2019t put two sentences together, here\u2019s a news flash: He just put NATO together, Europe together and the whole Western alliance together \u2014 stretching from Canada up to Finland and all the way to Japan \u2014 to help Ukraine protect its fledgling democracy from Vladimir Putin\u2019s fascist assault.<\/p>\n

In doing so, he has enabled Ukraine to inflict significant losses on Russia\u2019s invading army, thanks to a rapid deployment of US and NATO trainers and massive transfers of precision weapons. And not a single US soldier was lost.<\/p>\n

It has been the best performance of alliance management and consolidation since another president whom I covered and admired \u2014 who also was said to be incapable of putting two sentences together: George HW Bush. Bush helped manage the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, without firing a shot or the loss of a single American life.<\/p>\n

Alas, though, I left our lunch with a full stomach but a heavy heart.<\/p>\n

Biden didn\u2019t say it in so many words, but he didn\u2019t have to. I could hear it between the lines: He\u2019s worried that while he has reunited the West, he may not be able to reunite America.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clearly his priority, above any Build Back Better provision. And he knows that\u2019s why he was elected \u2014 a majority of Americans worried that the country was coming apart at the seams and that this old war horse called Biden, with his bipartisan instincts, was the best person to knit us back together. It\u2019s the reason he decided to run in the first place, because he knows that without some basic unity of purpose and willingness to compromise, nothing else is possible.<\/p>\n

But with every passing day, every mass shooting, every racist dog whistle, every defund-the-police initiative, every nation-sundering Supreme Court ruling, every speaker run off a campus, every bogus claim of election fraud, I wonder if he can bring us back together. I wonder if it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n

I fear that we\u2019re going to break something very valuable very soon. And once we break it, it will be gone \u2014 and we may never be able to get it back.<\/p>\n

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I am talking about our ability to transfer power peacefully and legitimately, an ability we have demonstrated since our founding. The peaceful, legitimate transfer of power is the keystone of American democracy. Break it, and none of our institutions will work for long, and we will be thrust into political and financial chaos.<\/p>\n

We are staring into that abyss right now. Because it is one thing to elect Donald Trump and pro-Trump candidates who want to restrict immigration, ban abortions, slash corporate taxes, pump more oil, curb sex education in schools and liberate citizens from mask mandates in a pandemic. Those are policies where there can be legitimate disagreement, which is the stuff of politics.<\/p>\n

But the recent primaries and the investigations around the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol are revealing a movement by Trump and his supporters that is not propelled by any coherent set of policies, but rather by a gigantic lie \u2014 that Biden did not freely and fairly win a majority of Electoral College votes and therefore is an illegitimate president.<\/p>\n

Thus, their top priority is installing candidates whose primary allegiance is to Trump and his Big Lie \u2014 not to the Constitution. And they are more than hinting that in any close election in 2024 \u2014 or even ones that aren\u2019t so close \u2014 they would be willing to depart from established constitutional rules and norms and award that election to Trump or other Republican candidates who didn\u2019t actually garner the most votes. They are not whispering this platform. They are running for office on it.<\/p>\n

In short, we are seeing a national movement that is telling us publicly and loudly: WE WILL GO THERE.<\/p>\n

And that terrifies me because: I HAVE BEEN THERE.<\/p>\n

My formative experience in journalism was watching Lebanese politicians go there in the late 1970s and plunge their frail democracy into protracted civil war. So don\u2019t tell me that it can\u2019t happen here.<\/p>\n

Not when people like Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano \u2014 an election denier who marched with the Jan. 6 crowd at the Capitol \u2014 just won the GOP primary to run for governor. Have no doubt: These people will never do what Al Gore did in 2000 \u2014 submit to a decision of the courts in an extremely close election and recognize his opponent as the legitimate president. And they will never do what principled Republicans running for office or acting as elections officials did after the 2020 election \u2014 accept the votes as they were tabulated in their states, accept the court orders that confirmed that there were no significant irregularities and permit Biden to legitimately take power.<\/p>\n

It is stomach-turning to watch the number of Trump Republicans running for office affirming his Big Lie, when we know that they know that we know that they know that they do not believe a single word of what they are saying. That\u2019s Dr Oz and JD Vance and so many others. Nevertheless, they are ready to hitch a ride on the Trump train to gain power. And they do it without even blushing.<\/p>\n

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It reached its nadir, in my view, when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, so obsessed with becoming speaker of the House at any cost, actually lied about telling the truth.<\/p>\n

McCarthy publicly denied the fact that immediately after Jan. 6 he explicitly (and on tape) told his Republican colleagues that he expected Trump to be impeached for inspiring the insurrection and that McCarthy intended to tell him he should resign.<\/p>\n

Who in your life have you ever encountered who lied about telling the truth?<\/p>\n

And this brings me back to my lunch with Biden. It clearly weighs on him that we have built a global alliance to support Ukraine, to reverse the Russian invasion and to defend core American principles abroad \u2014 the right to freedom and self-determination of all peoples \u2014 while the GOP is abandoning our most cherished principles at home.<\/p>\n

That is why so many allied leaders have privately said to Biden, as he and his team have revived the Western alliance from the splintered pieces that Trump left it in, \u201cThank God \u2014 America is back.\u201d And then they add, \u201cBut for how long?\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden cannot answer that question. Because WE cannot answer that question.<\/p>\n

Biden is not blameless in this dilemma, nor is the Democratic Party \u2014 particularly its far-left wing. Under pressure to revive the economy, and facing big-ticket demands from the far left, Biden pursued expansive spending for too long. House Democrats also sullied one of Biden\u2019s most important bipartisan achievements \u2014 a giant infrastructure bill \u2014 by making it hostage to other excessive spending demands. The far left also saddled Biden and every Democratic candidate with radical notions like \u201cdefund the police\u201d \u2014 an insane mantra that would have most harmed the Black and Hispanic base of the Democratic Party had it been implemented.<\/p>\n

To defeat Trumpism we need only, say, 10% of Republicans to abandon their party and join with a centre-left Biden, which is what he was elected to be and still is at heart. But we may not be able to get even 1% of Republicans to shift if far-left Democrats are seen as defining the party\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

And that is why I left my lunch with the president with a full stomach but a heavy heart.<\/p>\n

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President Joe Biden invited me for lunch at the White House last Monday. But it was all off the record — so I can’t tell you anything he said. I can, though, tell you two things — what I ate and how I felt after. I ate a tuna salad sandwich with tomato on whole wheat bread, with a bowl of mixed fruit and a chocolate milkshake for dessert that was so good it should have been against the law. What I felt afterward was this: For all you knuckleheads<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":28489,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28488"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28488"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28490,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28488\/revisions\/28490"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}