Biden And Trump Both Gave Interviews To Time Magazine. So That Would Be Both Sides Then!
One's a statesman, one's a babbling idiot. But which is which? Just kidding.
Time ran a cover story Tuesday on President Joe Biden, and also ran the transcript of the full interview that the story was based on. It pretty much demands to be compared to Time’s April 30 interview with Donald Trump — the one where he explained that lots of Americans like the idea of a dictator, as long as it’s him, and that whatever states decide to do on abortion is fine with him, including monitoring women to see if they’re pregnant, but also don’t worry about that, because the states will work it out so everyone likes the result, OK?
If you haven’t been hearing a lot of breaking news bombshells about the Time interview with Biden, that’s because Joe has this habit of being presidential and not saying crazy idiot shit every time he opens his mouth. So much of Biden’s presidency has been an airliner that landed safely, on time, without any doors coming off or threats to hand Europe to Vladimir Putin if it doesn’t pay protection money.
Over at the Bulwark, Jonathan Last offers a few points of comparison between the two Time interviews, but it’s paywalled, so for the good of America, let’s take a look at some of the subtle differences between these two candidates, as revealed in their own words.
For starters, take NATO, to which Trump would add, “please!”
We’re going to steal all of The Bulwark’s long blockquote, because we want you to see what Old Senile Joe thinks, and his Weltanschauung if you will.
Time: Is America still able to play the role of world power that it played in World War Two, and in the Cold War?
Biden: Yes, we're planning even more. We are, we are the world power. And what I inherited, as a consequence of the mistake that we made in Afghanistan is a—was not a loss in Afghanistan, excuse my cold. But I think that look, I believe, I have a fundamentally different view than Mr. Trump has on a range of things. Number one: I really believe that we have a values-based as well as practical-based alliances around the world. And he, Trump, wanted to just abandon them. He says he's practical, one-on-one things he's doing.
Well, he didn't get much done. And so we end up in a situation where, when I came into, when I got sworn in, we were in a position where we didn't have—for example, there's a quote from Macron at the time saying that, in 2019, that Trump wants to eviscerate NATO. He thinks NATO is useless. And we have to rethink our entire relationship with the United States, they no longer lead the world.
I have that exact quote here. And they no longer lead the world and the transatlantic alliance has to be reexamined. And the interesting piece of that is you now have his former adviser John Bolton saying, he’s certain that the first thing Trump would do if he got reelected is get out of NATO completely.
And so I've always believed that there are two elements to American security, and the biggest element and, and our normative example, is our alliances, our alliances. We are—we have, compared to the rest of the world, we have put together the strongest alliance in the history of the world, number one. Number two, we're in a situation where we are able to move in a way that recognizes how much the world has changed and still lead the world. And it's our security. For example, the idea that if when Putin decided to go into Russia—I mean, he's gonna go from Russia into Ukraine—the reason why I cleared the intelligence so we can release the information we knew that he was going to attack, was to let the world know we were still in charge. We still know what's going on.
This, by the way is, if you haven't read it, you should. [Pulls out copy of speech Putin delivered on Feb. 21, 2022] It's the address to the Russian people on the Donbass problem on February 21, when Moscow was going in. And it lays out why I believe Trump—what he never understood—which is that Russia, he wasn’t just going into Moscow, I mean from Russia into Ukraine, for purposes of keeping them from having weapons, etc. He believes it is an essential part of Russia, from the beginning.
He has just laid out, straight out. He said, he said, ‘I would like to emphasize again, Ukraine is not a neighboring country of us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space…Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russia, Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians.’ And he goes on. He makes this whole speech about why it is part of reestablishing the Soviet Union.
It’s a cogent analysis of what Trump doesn’t seem to understand about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: This isn’t just about the money involved in sending Ukraine weapons to defend itself, it’s about the security of the US, too. Putin says there’s no such country as Ukraine, it’s just part of Russia, and if the US sits back and does nothing, then there’s little reason to think Putin won’t try to get the whole Soviet band back together, with disastrous consequences for Europe and us.
Now, as you can see in the transcript, Biden sometimes starts saying something and then stops to revise himself, and slips once, saying Putin “wasn’t just going into Moscow, I mean from Russia into Ukraine,” which we suppose Fox News would cut before “I mean,” to suggest that Biden doesn’t know where Putin lives.
And then there’s Trump, who spoke with Time shortly after he said that if any NATO country “didn’t pay,” then he’d encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want.” It still blows our minds that after all these years, Trump still talks about NATO as if it has annual dues, instead of the reality, which is that member countries commit to spend at least two percent of their GDP on their own militaries. Nobody pays anything to NATO! Worse, too many media outlets, tired of fact checking him, just correct it for him and paraphrase it as if he’d said it right.
Hell, Time did that in the interview, too, asking whether the US would come to the defense of a NATO country “that you believe was not spending enough on their defense,” which isn’t what Trump said. It didn’t matter, since he went right back to his talk of “paying” anyway:
Yeah, when I said that, I said it with great meaning, because I want them to pay. I want them to pay up. That was said as a point of negotiation. I said, Look, if you're not going to pay, then you're on your own. And I mean that. And the question was asked to me: If we don't pay? It was asked to me long before this event. Do you know that, after I said that, do you know that billions of dollars poured into NATO? Do you know that? […]
Both then and three years before. Do you know that NATO—the cupboards were bare. They had no cash, they were dying, we were spending almost 100% of the money on NATO. We were protecting Europe. And they weren't even paying.
The linked bit there, of course, is to Time’s fact check of the interview, which points out that at no point in postwar history has the US ever provided 100 percent of the funding for Europe’s defense.
And he goes on:
Trump: Eight. Only eight countries were paying. The rest of them were delinquent. And I said to them, if you don't pay, enjoy yourselves, but we're not going to protect you. I said it again a few weeks ago, two months ago, I said it again. And I said it, that if you don't pay. Look, that's the way you talk as a negotiator. I'm negotiating because I want them to pay. I want Europe to pay. I want nothing bad to happen to Europe, I love Europe, I love the people of Europe, I have a great relationship with Europe. But they've taken advantage of us, both on NATO and on Ukraine. We're in for billions of dollars more than they're in in Ukraine. It shouldn't be that way. It should be the opposite way. Because they're much more greatly affected. We have an ocean in between us. They don't.
And there’s your contrast: Joe Biden talks like a normal US president who understands alliances and mutual self-defense (yes, we can argue about the value of military spending, but at least Biden lives on this planet), and Donald Trump sounds, as he always has on the topic of NATO, even before the 2016 election, like a mob boss who’s ready to send someone to break Belgium’s kneecaps if it falls behind on the “payments” that don’t exist in the first place. And also a rambling idiot who knows fewer words than your average golden retriever.
And hey, how about those fact checks? Time published fact checks of each interview, and as Last points out, the nine corrections for Biden tend to involve simple factual errors, like pointing out that where Biden said the population of Africa will soon be over a billion people, it’s actually already 1.4 billion and estimated to reach 2.5 billion by 2050, per the UN. The entire fact check for Biden, he notes, “is 761 words long.”
Trump needed 4,200 words of fact-checking, and most of it involved correcting outright lies, like the NATO thing, or pointing out that, despite Trump’s “I never said that at all” when asked about terminating the Constitution, he really did say that, yes he did:
The Facts: On Dec. 3, 2022, referring to the 2020 election, Trump posted on his Truth Social website: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
And that’s just one of many outright lies, fabrications, untruths, mendacities, and whoppers from Trump.
As Last says, lastly, “Anyone who cannot understand the difference between Biden and Trump is trying not to understand it. Their words are right here, for any voter to read. For free.”
Well sure, but Time is part of the lamestream media, so of course its verbatim transcript of Trump’s words will make him look dumb. That’s just how they do, those sneaky bastards.
[Bulwark / Time (Biden interview transcript) / Time (Trump interview transcript)]
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"Yeah, when I said that, I said it with great meaning,"
This kind of utter bollocks is low on the list of his many, many, many failings but it's high on the list of most frequently irritating. He thinks talking like this adds gravitas, and so he follows this formula for everything he says about everything he does- normally the thing he does or says was done or said by him "strongly" and "powerfully", then there will be a "but" and he will repeat himself- and it's never not grating.
OT: got confirmation that Fukui made it to the airport OK. Confirmation was a text complaining that the Mooseflot lounge wouldn't serve booze before 11am