Joe Biden Lucks Out with His Enemies Again

Susan Glasser: “The suspense of the evening was not rooted in what Biden would say but how he would say it—and how it would be received. Would the far-right Republican extremists who had held up their own party’s leadership through fifteen long ballots at the start of the year, rather than sign off on McCarthy as Speaker, once again act up?”

“The answer, of course, was yes. As if to prove the point, even McCarthy’s audible shushing could not get a few House Republican hecklers to shut up. And if their goal was to rattle the eighty-year-old President, embattled and down in the polls and facing questions even from within his own party about whether he should run again, it’s safe to say that it didn’t work.”

“Biden, it seemed, had carefully prepared for their antics. Had he scripted their reaction, he could not have asked for a better foil than Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former QAnon promoter who flirts with white supremacy.”