Biden’s rodeo: the President’s first 100 days have been a wild ride

Joe Biden, the 46th President of the United States, has never been able to keep his mouth shut. Throughout his absurdly long career in politics, he has always said too much, made stuff up, gone too far. His friends and fans just shrug it off. ‘That’s our Joe.’

The trouble is, Biden is now America’s Commander-in-Chief, leader of the not-so-free-anymore world, and his loquaciousness — and the mental fuzziness it betrays — is becoming a problem.

Take, for instance, his decision this week to intervene before the jury reached its verdict on the trial of Derek Chauvin, the white police officer now found guilty of the murder last year of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. ‘I’m praying the verdict is the right verdict. I think it’s overwhelming in my view,’ Biden said. ‘I wouldn’t say that unless the jury was sequestered,’ he quickly added — as if there were nothing untoward in a president weighing in pre-emptively on the most racially charged legal trial in America since the O.J.