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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
National
Shweta Sharma

Fox host complains Biden doesn’t push other world leaders out of his way physically like Trump did

REUTERS

Fox News host Jesse Watters bizarrely complained that Joe Biden does not assert dominance by shoving other world leaders out of his way like Donald Trump did.

The longtime Fox News anchor, who was recently announced as Tucker Carlson’s replacement on the network, said that the US president allowed “every world leader to walk all over him” during the Nato summit in Lithuania.

He said his behaviour was unlike Mr Trump’s, who was recorded shoving the president of Montenegro, Dusko Markovic, to be at the centre for photo-ops during a 2017 summit.

Expressing disappointment, Watters said: “The American president usually dominates every room.

“When [George W] Bush went overseas, he commanded authority. Every leader was trying to get facetime. Optics is always important in politics, especially overseas. The world’s watching.”

“Trump knew that. 2017, when all the leaders were heading to a photo op, Trump pushed the president [sic] of Montenegro out of the way so he could be front and centre. Sorry, Montenegro, we got the F-35s.

“Biden doesn’t do that. Looks like a freshman on the first day of school,” he said, referring to the 2017 summit during Mr Trump’s visit to the Nato headquarters in Brussels.

He said Mr Biden is “letting all world leaders walk all over him. They are all acting like he is not there. They are reaching over his body, shoving him out of the way”.

He claimed nobody wanted to meet Mr Biden.

The network played the visuals of Mr Biden’s visit to Vilnius, Lithuania, for the Nato summit where world leaders gathered, including Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, to discuss Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Last week an attempt by Watters to mock Mr Biden for mixing up Iraq and Ukraine went comically awry when the host managed to confuse the countries himself.

Watters was discussing two recent gaffes by Mr Biden that saw the president say “Iraq” when he meant to say “Ukraine”.

Commenting on the internal uprising in Russia that left its president Vladimir Putin on the back foot over the weekend, Mr Biden said Mr Putin was “clearly losing the war in Iraq and losing the war at home” in the latest in a series of verbal blunders for the gaffe-prone president.

But Watters’s attempt to chide Mr Biden flopped when he commented that the president “comes out and confusing Iraq with Afghanistan”.

“Fine, just don’t send Iran $800bn,” referencing the aide the US has sent to Ukraine since Russia invaded at the beginning of 2022.

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