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Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday June 15th 2021.

I'm John Pohritz, the editor of commentary magazine with me as always executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.

Hi John. Senior writer Christine Rose and high Christine.

Hi John. And associate editor Noah Rothman. So Joe Biden has been in Europe in England,

the meeting with everybody and we talked made some jokes yesterday about how he said the queen was

like his mother. But he had a press conference yesterday afternoon. Noah Abe you guys watch

what are your thoughts about the president's performance on his maiden trip abroad?

I think we're probably two headlines that I took away from that press conference the first being that

I don't remember the reporter who asked it but he was asked about his forthcoming

bilateral summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin and whether or not he's still subscribed

to the notion that Vladimir Putin was a killer. And the president responded with a very labor

diplomatic response that led him to be silent for an agonizingly long period of time.

It took the better part of a full minute might have been a full minute where he was just sort of

gathering his thoughts and produced a word salad that I couldn't even recall if you asked me to.

But the bottom line was he was engaged in a very diplomatic effort to avoid saying what either what

he thought or confirming his previous impressions of Vladimir Putin subsequently he was asked by some

enterprising reporter using the subnoxious trick that they do where they want to just talk about

domestic politics abroad that allies are concerned about domestic events in the United States.

Notably the January 6 assault on the capital. And he was asking you know Joe Biden used this

pivot point which he was led to by this reporter to just dump all over the Republican party

which is you know to say the very least to be the most charitable I possibly can gouse in

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