HANOI, Vietnam — Overseas travel is brutal for the youngest of presidents, much less the oldest.
At the midpoint of the Asia trip that Joe Biden just finished, he looked out at the press corps and made an observation thick with irony: “These five-day trips around the world are no problem.”
Lost sleep wasn’t Biden’s only misfortune. He bungled his whereabouts the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, feeding criticism that at age 80, he is unfit for office.
But he stuck to a whirlwind schedule, visiting India and Vietnam, appearing at a summit of the world’s wealthiest countries, speaking to more than 20 foreign leaders, holding a news conference and courting countries that the United States needs to create a bulwark against Chinese aggression.
That’s a lot for anyone and, as he hurtled across continents, the toll started to show. At the press conference Sunday, he struggled to recount the plot of an unnamed John Wayne movie while making a point about climate change.
President Joe Biden and Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong during a meeting at the presidential palace in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Monday. Nhac Nguyen / Pool via AP
On the way home the next day, he stopped in Alaska to mark the anniversary of 9/11. There, he described visiting the wreckage at ground zero in New York one day after the terrorist attack. Yet on that day in 2001, he was in Washington, D.C., delivering remarks on the Senate floor. He and other senators traveled to the site more than a week after the attack. Was that a gaffe born out of fatigue, an honest mistake or an exaggeration from a president with a penchant for dropping himself in the middle of the action? The White House did not comment.
International diplomacy isn’t the only thing on Biden’s mind these days. A family crisis is also weighing on him. The special counsel investigating his son Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges said in a court filing last week that he plans to seek an indictment of the younger Biden by month’s end.
Biden circumnavigates the globe and critics zero in on missteps along the way
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