Former President Barack Obama is planning a grand return to his old address at the 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. for a meeting with Joe Biden to discuss their administration’s 2010 Affordable Care Act. The meeting follows the current president’s various flubs in Europe that stoked world tensions amid the Russia-Ukraine war.
The move would be the first time Obama stepped foot in the White House since his departure in 2017, following 45th President Donald Trump’s electoral victory over Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. Obama is apparently joining Biden and Kamala Harris for an event to celebrate the Affordable Care Act after 12 years, according to CNN:
A White House official said Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Obama “will deliver remarks celebrating the success of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid in extending affordable health insurance to millions of Americans as a part of the President’s agenda to cut costs for American families.”
Obama’s trip back to his old digs comes after Biden made a series of verbal blunders during his trip to Europe, with the White House repeatedly correcting its top executive.
When confronted by American reporters, Biden claimed his mistakes never happened.
He denied that he told U.S. troops that they are going to Ukraine, the press that the U.S. would respond “in kind” to a chemical weapons attack from Russia, and that he called for regime change in Russia while in Poland, despite all of those remarks being made in front of the entire world on video during his trip to Europe.
All of this comes after two years of intense scrutiny of Biden’s mental faculties by Republicans.
Top pundits and cable news hosts have questioned Biden’s fitness for office, cognitive abilities, and his administration’s overall competency to the point where the 25th amendment is a mainstream part of the conservative conversation.
Last year Richard Grenell, who was the Acting Director of the United States National Intelligence under Trump, noted that many high-level positions in the Biden administration are held by prominent former Obama administration officials. He speculated that there is a a “shadow” government led by Susan Rice.
.@RichardGrenell on the far-Left's control of the Biden admin:
"Biden is too weak to stop the progressive Left from taking over…Kamala does not understand what's going on…We have a shadow president in Susan Rice and no one is paying attention." pic.twitter.com/8vyEJheUOx
— CPAC 2022 (@CPAC) May 12, 2021
Fox News juggernaut Tucker Carlson has repeatedly made similar arguments on his program.
“Biden’s handlers are doing everything they can to prevent us from noticing that he’s not really in charge,” argued Carlson in October 2021.
“The question is not: is Joe Biden mentally impaired? Obviously, he is, and again, we’re not going to gloat over it,” said the Fox News host. “But a much more important question for the rest of us is: If he’s not running the government, then who is?”
“Clearly,” said Carlson, “the FBI, the DOJ and the military are already acting independently of the elected president of the United States.”
Obama, meanwhile, raised eyebrows in 2020 when he joked that he would love to continue the “fascinating” work of being president, if only he could simply tell someone else what to do by speaking into a microphone connected to an earpiece.
“If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand in, a front man, a frontwoman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in the basement in my sweats,” joked Obama, “I’d be fine with that, because I found the work fascinating.”
