Alex Thompson delivered a fine scoop Monday on President Joe Biden’s raging at his staff, even if the Axios scribe tried to present the ugly news as evidence the prez is sharper than the public thinks.
Actually, that Biden in private is a bully (in stark contrast to his huggy-folksy public persona) is old news in Washington.
But Thompson reports his temper’s grown so ugly “that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him.
Some take a colleague, almost as a shield against a solo blast.”
The president’s profane outbursts, Axios tells us, include gems like “God dammit, how the f–k don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t f–king bullsh-t me!” and “Get the f–k out of here!”
It’s not hard to wonder how the media would cover a Republican exhibiting the same behavior.
Ironically, notes Mediaite’s Isaac Schor, Biden on his first day in the White House told top staff that everyone in the new administration was “entitled to be treated with decency and dignity,” pointedly contrasting his approach with his predecessor’s.
Oops.
Thompson says Biden aides (read spinners) told him this shows just how deeply the president is engaged in policy detail — that he mainly erupts when staffers can’t answer his questions, or speak in “wonky, acronym-filled language.”
Those who question Biden’s cognitive ability have already said this proves his explosive frustration at not being able to get on top of the enormous demands of the job.
Whatever the truth to that, it seems likely that he just rages at those who tell him what he doesn’t want to hear.
How else to explain his insistence that no one warned him that his Afghan bugout could go bad, something Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley and others categorically deny?
That is: Biden’s been an “egomaniacal autocrat” (as one former aide puts it) his whole career, but now that he’s president no one can stand up to him — even though, since he’s 80 and the world’s most powerful man, he more than ever needs people telling him how the world works.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
