Who would you choose between Joe Biden and Donald Trump if you were voting in the 2024 US presidential election? There are those who are in crisis over the question or who prefer to keep a fair distance (Giuseppe Conte) and those who have no doubts. But in the opposite sense than one would expect. At least in words. When asked about the issue by a Russian state television journalist, Vladimir Putin said he would prefer Joe Biden to remain at the helm of the US rather than see Trump return. The current president is “more experienced, more predictable, a politician of the old school,” the Moscow autocrat said cryptically, while emphasizing that the Kremlin will work with any US president in whom the American people place their trust. Putin, who has been at “indirect” war with the White House for nearly two years when he launched the invasion of Ukraine, even went so far as to defend Biden against the increasingly open accusations made against him of unreliability, signs of senile dementia and recalled the feelings he had when the two last met in Switzerland in 2021: “Even then, people said he was incompetent, but I didn't notice anything like that. Yes, he kept looking at his cards, but to be honest, I did the same thing too: so nothing strange.” And Biden's balance problems, like when he hit his head on the roof of the helicopter? “Come on, who says this hasn’t happened to him before?”
In the head of the former KGB agent
A defense that is as unexpected and exaggerated as it is suspicious, notes the BBC. Suffice it to reconcile things: Biden is the US president who has attacked Putin harder than anyone the Russian leader has ever faced in his long reign. Over the years, he called him a “dictator” and a “gangster” and accused him of “chronic greed for land and power.” Trump, on the other hand, has never hidden his weakness for strongmen like Putin, calling him a “genius” in the past and repeatedly giving signs that he has little desire to defend Ukraine or any other European country from Russia until he revealed last weekend that it would actually encourage her to do “whatever the hell she wants” with Europe. Had he explicitly said he preferred Trump, Putin would likely have given a macroscopic gift to the Democrats – who are currently in serious trouble – who would have had an easy time accusing the tycoon of being, in reality, Putin's “candidate,” a Trojan horse , being Russian – an indigestible accusation even among Republicans. It's better to put on a good face in a bad situation and astonish the world again by defending – with some implicitly toxic accents – the old Biden. Pure Putin style. On Russian television, he once again mocked the West and also criticized the interview that Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News journalist and very close to Trump, gave him last week: “There were no sharp questions,” Putin remarked slyly . At least on this point, it's difficult to blame him.
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