Secretary of State Antony Blinken couldn't maintain a poker face while listening to his boss, President Joe Biden, answer questions from reporters following his high-stakes meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Northern California this week.
"After today, would you still refer to President Xi as a dictator?" came the question from a reporter noting it was a term Biden used to describe the leader earlier this year.
"Well look, he is," Biden responded. "He's a dictator in the sense that he's a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that's based on a form of government totally different than ours," the president added.
While it's true that President Xi is a genocidal tyrant and leader of one country making up a new axis of evil along with his pals in Russia, North Korea, Iran, and elsewhere, Secretary Blinken apparently would have preferred Biden not criticize his Chinese counterpart as the Biden administration works to (rather inexplicably) mend fences with a country set on dominating the globe.
Just watch Blinken's face and reaction when Biden calls Xi a dictator:
Secretary Blinken’s face when Biden calls President Xi a dictator is something to behold… pic.twitter.com/c4istlPm4a
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 16, 2023
The paternal-looking disappointment apparent on Blinken's face is hardly the first time administration officials have shown the effects of serving as Biden's babysitter when the president goes off-script in public speeches or press conferences.
When Biden delivered remarks in Poland after Russia invaded Ukraine, he ad-libbed a line about how "for God's sake, this man [Putin] cannot remain in power," sending Blinken scrambling to correct the record and explain "we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia or anywhere else for that matter."
In another speech, Biden discussed Taiwan and China's escalating harassment of the island nation. The president answered a question about U.S. support for Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion by saying "yes" the U.S. would get involved militarily to defend Taiwan because "that's the commitment we made." Except, we didn't and that's not been the U.S. policy. Again, the White House rushed to declare that Biden didn't mean what he'd just said.