When you’ve got one last shot at proving to your detractors that you’re definitely not senile or it might be the end of the world as we know it, there are probably better ways to start than to stare Volodymyr Zelensky lovingly in the eyes and call him “President Putin”.
President Biden corrected himself immediately, arguably even before the final gulp of oxygen had rushed out the room, but immediately was still a lifetime too late. There were agonised groans in the Nato summit media area but up on stage, surrounded by the most powerful people in the western world, the silence spoke with terrible volume.
Presidents and prime ministers gritted their teeth as one. Emmanuel Macron, Sir Keir Starmer, Olaf Scholz — each and every one of them swallowed so hard in perfect unison it’s possible they really did believe they might somehow ingest the moment whole and make it go away.
But the moment was just too big. Some gaffes are so big they’re a paradigm shift. Not just for Biden, but for all of us.
Oh to think of all those funny stories, collected over a lifetime, that simply don’t matter any more. That time when you might have asked a work colleague “When’s it due?” and they turned out not to be pregnant. When you leaned into that pram and said, “Oh he’s so cute! What’s his name?” and the mum said “Molly”. Well, they’re all worthless now. No one will care because Biden has called Zelensky “President Putin” and the world will never be the same again.
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To think, now, that it might have required only the slightest chronological shift and a British prime minister could have left the D-Day commemorations early and no one would have even noticed.
The 81-year-old president had made it to the very final seconds of hosting a two-day long gathering of world leaders, which is considered to have been a huge success. Resolutions have been reached, solidarity shown. Zelensky will go back to Ukraine with a large consignment of F-16 fighter jets, for which he has been asking for years.
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Ukraine has, we are told, been set on an irreversible path to Nato membership. The US has committed to sending hypersonic missiles to be based in Germany from 2026. That’s the sort of thing that, 15 or so years ago, Barack Obama’s young whippersnapper of a vice-president might have called a “big f***ing deal”.
That should maybe matter more than a slip of the presidential tongue, but it doesn’t. Tens of billions of dollars of weapons may not end up doing anywhere near as much damage as that short but seismic moment of parapraxis.
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It will surely be the end of him, even though no one seems to have come up with a better idea. Even before this, Biden’s world was falling apart around him, as George Clooney defenestrated him via The New York Times.
What a hit, above all else. You have to take a moment to admire it. To come out fighting for your political life and to then punch yourself so perfectly in your own face barely a single step into the ring walk is nothing short of mesmerising. It was lights out before seconds out. The seconds never went in.
The total self-knockout delayed the event for which the world had been waiting by more than an hour. Biden’s first full press conference for months started almost 90 minutes late. When it did start, he just about managed to come out fighting, but it was not a contest anybody would ever wish to see.
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He coughed a lot. He spoke too quickly to properly articulate his words. “No one cowered,” he said, of the unity of the West in the face of Russian aggression. But a stirring bon mot is less stirring when you have to take a second to understand he’s not talking about Noël Coward.
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He faced down questions about his own deterioration by repeating his achievements as president, which are not insignificant, but he deteriorated as he did so.
He took questions for almost an hour, on several occasions speaking fluently and lucidly about matters of immense geopolitical complexity, on the rise of China and Russia’s specific role within it. It was arguably more impressive than his opponent’s recent exposition on the relative merits of death by shark attack or electrocution by battery-powered boat.
But also, well, he was asked if Kamala Harris, his vice-president, was qualified to be president, and he said the following: “I wouldn’t have picked vice-president Trump to be vice-president, if she’s not qualified to be president.”
And so that will surely be that. So long, Mr President. As the late Edward Murrow liked to say and George Clooney kind of plagiarised, good night and good luck.
