Joe Biden’s Ireland trip is all about Joe Biden

Half a century since he was sworn in as a US senator, the Biden brand is a well-established series of safe bets: a fondness for aviator sunglasses, a hankering for chocolate chip ice cream. Also high on the list: conspicuous displays of Irishness. The second Irish-American president is fond of quoting Heaney and Yeats. He may be the only teetotaler who enjoys St. Patrick’s Day, which he says is his favorite holiday.

And so much about Biden’s trip to Ireland this week is unsurprising. After landing in Belfast…

Joe Biden’s Ireland trip is all about Joe Biden

Half a century since he was sworn in as a US senator, the Biden brand is a well-established series of safe bets: a fondness for aviator sunglasses, a hankering for chocolate chip ice cream. Also high on the list: conspicuous displays of Irishness. The second Irish-American president is fond of quoting Heaney and Yeats. He may be the only teetotaler who enjoys St. Patrick’s Day, which he says is his favorite holiday.

And so much about Biden’s trip to Ireland this week is unsurprising. After landing in Belfast last night, the president this morning had a quick cuppa with British prime minister Rishi Sunak and gave a speech to mark twenty-five years since the Good Friday Agreement. The address was carefully calibrated to avoid controversy: heavy on the-kids-are-the-future bromides about peace and progress, light on specific demands or advice for a local politicians. Biden has not been shy about stern rebukes for Unionists or Brexiteers in the past, but today he offered the carrot of a boost in US investment as an incentive for Northern Ireland’s leaders to come to a deal on power-sharing.

Then he hot-footed it south, out of Northern Ireland and into the Republic, where he will spend the rest of the week. Perhaps security concerns dictate only the briefest of visits to Belfast, but it is surely the next three days that Biden will relish the most. It’s a long time for any president to be in one foreign country, let alone one as small and strategically peripheral as Ireland. It is an especially long time for Biden, who is reluctant to travel further than Delaware. In other words: this trip matters to Biden. It’s an exercise in self-mythologizing designed to tie his family’s story to America’s story.

Biden’s Belfast speech was thick with the kind of Irish-American pride he has deployed for decades. “You know who designed the White House? An Irishman! No, not a joke,” he said. (Can you think of a more identifiably Biden string of words than those?)

In the coming days, between the usual trappings of a presidential visit, he will criss-cross the Emerald Isle in search of traces of Finnegans and Kearneys and other ancestors. (No Bidens though — that part of the family came from boring old England.) The trip’s crescendo will be on Friday night, at St. Muredach’s Cathedral in County Mayo. According to the White House, Biden’s great-great-great-grandparents Edward Blewitt and Mary Mulderg paid for their ticket to the United States with the money they earned selling bricks that were used to build that Cathedral in 1851. Given that backstory, expect a speech aimed at a US audience and focused on domestic themes. In the past, Biden has drawn connections between the Irish-American experience and the values that define working- and middle-class America.

For a president gearing up to announce a re-election bid, that may be unsurprising. And yet, Biden’s visit to Ireland feels like an indulgence that he, and America, cannot afford. From a crucial period in the war in Ukraine and Emmanuel Macron’s eyebrow-raising comments about China to pivots from one-time close allies such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE away from Washington towards Beijing, the world is changing quickly — and not for the better.

Biden’s foreign policy includes an unhelpfully strict framework of democracies versus autocracies. It has featured clumsiness and negligence (as in the case of the Afghanistan withdrawal and some of Biden’s comments shortly before and after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan). But it’s perhaps defined by aloofness and disengagement. A geopolitically insignificant jaunt around Ireland encapsulates that all too neatly.

On our radar

INFLATION COOLS, CORE PRICES RISE FASTER While today’s inflation numbers showed the headline figure easing to 5 percent in March, the lowest rate in two years, core prices — a measure which excludes food and energy numbers — rose at an accelerated 5.6 percent in the month.

TRUMP: THEY WEPT FOR ME In an interview with Tucker Carlson last night, Donald Trump said of his Manhattan court appearance: “I’ll tell you, people were crying. People that work there. … It’s a tough, tough place and they were crying. They were actually crying. They said, ‘I’m sorry … 2024, sir, 2024.’… So in one sense, it was beautiful.”

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Glenn Youngkin, fundraising machine

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin tamped down rumors that he might be exploring a 2024 presidential run yesterday, telling reporters he is wholly focused on his state’s upcoming General Assembly elections this fall.

“Listen, I didn’t write a book, and I’m not in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina because the road to holding our House and winning our Senate majority is through greater Richmond and Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia and I-81 corridor,” Youngkin said, adding that he holds no ill-will to advisors who jumped ship to join the pending DeSantis campaign.

Even if Youngkin doesn’t run in 2024, he still has a major role to play. Spirit of Virginia, Youngkin’s political action committee, announced the governor raised a record $2.75 million in the first quarter of 2023 to support Republican candidates in his state. In his first fifteen months in office, Youngkin has raised more money than his three predecessors combined. With that kind of fundraising prowess, Youngkin’s backing will certainly be sought after by national candidates. It might also be an incentive for whoever wins the primary to bring him on as a VP pick. Much to consider!

–Amber Athey

Scott readies his presidential run

Yesterday afternoon, Cockburn scooped that, per three sources, South Carolina senator Tim Scott was preparing to announce a presidential bid as early as this week.

Scott has been doing the pre-announcement ritual of touring early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire — as well as his home state of South Carolina.

Cockburn reached out to Scott’s staff for confirmation and was redirected to an agency representing the senator, who said it was “not correct” that an announcement was coming in South Carolina this week. Cockburn waited with bated breath…

And then, quelle surprise, news came, via the Post and Courier that evening that Scott “plans to launch a presidential exploratory committee on April 12.” This morning he made the announcement in Iowa and subsequently appeared on Fox & Friends.

Per the Post-Courier’s Caitlin Byrd, Scott is “the first could-be 2024 Republican candidate to create a formal committee devoted to raising money to explore a presidential bid even as other GOP contenders have filed into the race.

“The move acts as something of a soft launch for an all-but-certain Scott presidential campaign,” she writes.

–Cockburn