![]() Not long ago, most Americans found it inconceivable that they might once again face the choice between Trump and Biden. Gesturing around the room, he said, “I don’t do interviews here, because it’s not so commodious.” He gave a rueful laugh and headed back to his office. At the age of eighty-one, in his fourth year as President, he displays less of the reflex to fill every silence. (As early as 1970, a colleague of Biden’s on a Delaware county council observed that he could make a “fifteen-minute speech on the underside of a blade of grass.”) But, in the dining room, he let the moment pass. “This is where he sat,” Biden said, and I braced for a bit of speechifying on democracy or character or the defiling of the Presidency. It is a period in Presidential history that the House select committee on January 6th later called “187 Minutes of Dereliction.” With the television remote and a Diet Coke close at hand, he watched the events live on Fox News, rewinding at times for a second look. It was in front of that TV that Trump spent the afternoon of January 6, 2021, after exhorting his supporters to march on the Capitol and stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election. Another is dominated by a large television set, installed by Donald Trump. One wall is graced by “The Peacemakers,” a famous painting of Lincoln and his military commanders, on the cusp of winning the Civil War. (It’s one of his favorites, even though Bobby Kennedy thought that it evoked his brother during the Bay of Pigs debacle.) He continued to the Oval Office dining room, a small, elegant space where, in Biden’s eight years as Vice-President, he often visited Barack Obama for lunch. He passed a study off the Oval, where he keeps a rack of extra shirts, an array of notes sent in by the public, and a portrait of John F. They had expected him to remain at his desk for a while agents, referring to him by his handle, had passed word: “Celtic is in the Oval.” Walking by, he said, in a whispery deadpan, “Hey, guys-it’s a raid,” and then moved on.īiden, always a little taller than you expect, wore a navy suit and a bright-blue tie. As he led the way through a door toward his private chambers, he startled two Secret Service agents in the corridor. The Middle East was aflame, and Biden’s approval rating was among the lowest of any President in history, but, for the moment, he was preoccupied with Donald Trump. It was noon on a Wednesday, in the doldrums of January. “I’ll show you where Trump sat and watched the revolution,” Joe Biden said, stepping out from behind his desk in the Oval Office.
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