On the 13th hour of the third day of a two-country trip, President Biden stepped onstage at a news conference in Vietnam and bid reporters there a good evening.
At least, he thought so.
“It is evening, isn’t it?” the president said, drawing laughs from the jet-lagged masses. “This around-the-world-in-five-days is interesting, isn’t it?”
He was joking, but only sort of.
The trip, which began in New Delhi with the Group of 20 summit, was a whirlwind for Mr. Biden. He went abroad with a list of diplomatic to-dos, most of which were aimed at signaling to China that the United States was working to line up allies who are fed up with Beijing’s aggression in the region. In Hanoi, he celebrated the elevation of the U.S.-Vietnamese partnership to the highest level in Vietnam’s diplomatic hierarchy, and said it was part of his administration’s strategy to bolster the American presence in the Indo-Pacific.
But Mr. Biden took another objective overseas, too, as he enters an election season facing questions about his age and stamina: showing that he is still up to the challenges of globe-trotting statesmanship.
His aides described a president in near constant motion. Before traveling to Hanoi, advisers said that Mr. Biden had met with more than 30 world leaders, mostly in informal meet-and-greets, at the G20 summit in India. The interactions, they said, were designed to be more ad hoc than the traditional bilateral meetings that accompany international summits.
Before Saturday’s diplomacy, Mr. Biden, 80, participated in Mass remotely, according to aides who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to publicly discuss behind-the-scenes movements. The president also told aides that he wanted to reach out to the tennis player Coco Gauff, who had just won the U.S. Open, so they worked to find time for a call. (Aides said he’d been following the tournament.)
With all the running around, it seemed like little coincidence when, in Hanoi, Mr. Biden repeated himself: “These five-day trips around the world are no problem,” he told a BBC reporter who confirmed the time of day.
Mr. Biden’s trip may ultimately do little to alter his political fortunes back home, where his polling numbers are low and he seems headed toward a tight race against his predecessor, Donald J. Trump. House Republicans are itching to push ahead on a long-shot impeachment inquiry, and his son, Hunter, is facing federal indictment on a gun possession charge.
The president is also facing persistent questions about his age and effectiveness as a messenger for his own agenda — part of a broader conversation in Washington about leaders, some with health problems, who remain in office well into their 80s or 90s.
As aging politicians of both parties, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, suffer from health complications in the public eye, some are beginning to call for more transparency into the medical history of…
2023-09-11 03:44:36
Original from www.nytimes.com
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