Tipsheet

Joe Biden Sure Is Having a Tough Time at the NATO Summit

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  July 11, 2023 8:45 PM

President Joe Biden is in Lithuania for the 74th NATO Summit, where concerns about his age and mental acuity are fully on display, with Nick Arama at our sister site of RedState highlighting some particularly alarming examples. 

It's not just that Biden is prone to verbal gaffes. We're past that. That the 80-year-old president has to be led around Lithuania is not the best look.

This president does whatever his staff tells him to do, with those instructions often literally written out on cards for him, and with more detail and directions than there ought to be. Another habit of Biden is to say the quiet part out loud, which is to point out that he gets into trouble for going off script. 

This is a president who doesn't take questions from the press, no matter what White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tries to claim, and the NATO Summit wasn't much different.

What comments Biden did make cause such confusion it's quite clear why it is that he's not allowed to speak all that much. 

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"It didn’t take us long to get thousands of troops here when Russia invaded the second time. We’ll be assured that you’re gonna have all that you need. We have the secretary of defense here today. We can send him along," he told Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda.

Did Biden know who he was talking to, or what about? Did he perhaps think he was talking about Ukraine? Or perhaps, another country? If he was indeed talking about Lithuania, at least it's part of NATO. 

Regardless of who he thought he was talking to, or what about, it's a pretty big promise to make to another country "that you're gonna have all that you need," even more so if he thought he was talking about Ukraine, given that it's not part of NATO. His words could very well have consequences, considering he's the leader of the free world. 

Arama doesn't seem to know either:

I’m confused. What is he talking about here? I think it’s Ukraine (does he know where he is?), but then is he admitting we had “thousands of troops” in Ukraine? Or is he talking about Lithuania? Lithuania has only been a NATO member since 2004. Then did he offer them our secretary of defense? Since it’s Joe, it’s always an exercise to try to figure out exactly what he’s talking about. That’s a big problem on the world stage where a careless word can have big consequences, as we saw when he talked about essentially being cool with a “minor incursion” in Ukraine. Biden’s errors have already cost a lot.

The day's events look to have been too much for the president, as is he is not going to the NATO dinner, sending Secretary of State Antony Blinken instead. The response that the president "has had four full days of official business" doesn't quite fly, as many pointed out how Biden had just spent last weekend at the beach. He's so far spent 39.2 percent of his presidency on vacation. 

Even with all that rest Biden is looking to have as he "is preparing for a big speech tomorrow in addition to another day at the summit," who is to say that's going to help the president look any better?

The alarming incompetency wasn't limited to just Biden, though. During the Tuesday morning press briefing in Lithuania, Jean-Pierre tripped over her words before accurately pointing out it was the 74th NATO Summit.