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We know that Joe Biden has used bad words.
Among the most famous moments in the president’s long career in public life was that time at the signing ceremony for the Affordable Care Act in 2010 when, captured by the hot mic, the then-vice president told Barack Obama that updating the nation’s health care laws was a BFD. Except Biden didn’t use the acronym.
What people might not know – and what becomes apparent in CNN’s report on a new book by journalist Bob Woodward – is that Biden apparently swears like a sailor.
There are many noteworthy nuggets in the book, obtained before its publication next week by CNN’s Jamie Gangel, Jeremy Herb and Elizabeth Stuart.
Gangel breaks down most shocking revelations from Woodward’s new book
Read their full report, which documents tales as varied as the Saudi crown prince’s large bag of burner phones and Biden’s regret at choosing Merrick Garland as his attorney general.
Woodward, who has written fly-on-the-wall accounts of every recent president, including multiple books about Trump, based this account that’s focused on the Biden administration on hundreds of hours of interviews. Many of these interviews, conducted by one of the journalists who talked to “Deep Throat” back in the Watergate era, are reported without attribution.
It is an interesting exercise to compare how Woodward portrays these politicians as talking behind closed doors – apparently with lots of salty language – with how they talk in public.
In public, Trump has said he got along well with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that Putin deferred to him after Trump warned Putin not to invade Ukraine.
Here’s how Trump phrased it to tech billionaire Elon Musk during their interview on X earlier this year:
Trump added that getting along well with strongmen world leaders “is a good thing.”
The nonpublic details in Woodward’s book add some patina to how Trump gets along with world leaders. There’s no evidence in the passage described in CNN’s report of Trump laying down the law for Putin.
Rather, Trump ships Putin some Covid-19 testing equipment at a time when they were in short supply for Americans. Putin, apparently trying to protect Trump, tells the then-US president not to tell anyone about the gift.
“No, no,” Putin said, according to Woodward’s book. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.”
Woodward also reports, according to an unnamed Trump aide, that Trump and Putin have maintained their relationship and spoken on the phone perhaps as many as seven times since Trump left office in early 2021. Trump’s campaign denies the reporting.
Biden and Harris on Netanyahu
The Biden administration has tried to maintain its support for Israel while also diplomatically expressing frustration with Israel’s leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Asked by CBS News on “60 Minutes” if Netanyahu was a close ally, Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ nominee for president in the November election, did not exactly disparage Netanyahu in her response, but she did keep him at arm’s length.
“I think, with all due respect, the better question is: Do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people?” Harris said. “And the answer to that question is yes.”
The unvarnished view at the White House includes more curse words, according to the Woodward book.
Biden called Netanyahu a “bad guy,” before repeating the phrase with the F word. The president also used the expletive when, in private, he called Netanyahu a liar. Plus, Biden used the word on a phone call with Netanyahu after an Israeli airstrike on Beirut in July.
“What the f**k,” Biden said to Netanyahu, according to Woodward.
Woodward also describes Biden as using harsh language to describe Trump: “that f**king a**hole.”
Former President George W. Bush is described as commiserating with Biden about the president’s decision to pull US troops out of Afghanistan and uses an expletive to describe how he was done wrong by his “intel people.” This, presumably, is an allusion to the flawed intelligence that Bush’s administration used to sell an invasion of Iraq to the United Nations and the American people.
Ironically, Woodward’s report sheds new light on the US intelligence community’s great recent triumph of piercing into the Kremlin’s war plans for Ukraine, apparently with a human source. The intelligence was accurate, but the Biden administration could not convince Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky it was true, even when Harris made the case in person at a conference in Munich.
In private, Biden acknowledged that Obama failed to take Putin seriously and that the administration, of which Biden was a part, “f**ked up” when Putin claimed Crimea in 2014.
The new book also includes an anecdote in which Harris purportedly describes her own ability to use a swear word.
Most people might speak differently when they know they’re in public. Somehow, Woodward seems to get that private language out in a very public way.
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