ThOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
My Lunch With President Biden
May 22, 2022
President Biden invited me for lunch at the White House last Monday. But it was all off the record — so I can’t tell you anything he said.
I can, though, tell you two things — what I ate and how I felt after. I ate a tuna salad sandwich with tomato on whole wheat bread, with a bowl of mixed fruit and a chocolate milkshake for dessert that was so good it should have been against the law.
What I felt afterward was this: For all you knuckleheads on Fox who say that Biden can’t put two sentences together, here’s a news flash: He just put NATO together, Europe together and the whole Western alliance together — stretching from Canada up to Finland and all the way to Japan — to help Ukraine protect its fledgling democracy from Vladimir Putin’s fascist assault.
In doing so, he has enabled Ukraine to inflict significant losses on Russia’s invading army, thanks to a rapid deployment of U.S. and NATO trainers and massive transfers of precision weapons. And not a single American soldier was lost.
In short, we are seeing a national movement that is telling us publicly and loudly: WE WILL GO THERE.
And that terrifies me because: I HAVE BEEN THERE.
My formative experience in journalism was watching Lebanese politicians go there in the late 1970s and plunge their frail democracy into protracted civil war. So don’t tell me that it can’t happen here.
Not when people like Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano — an election denier who marched with the Jan. 6 crowd at the Capitol — just won the G.O.P. primary to run for governor. Have no doubt: These people will never do what Al Gore did in 2000 — submit to a decision of the courts in an extremely close election and recognize his opponent as the legitimate president. And they will never do what principled Republicans running for office or acting as elections officials did after the 2020 election — accept the votes as they were tabulated in their states, accept the court orders that confirmed that there were no significant irregularities and permit Biden to legitimately take power.
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