No one can question Joe Biden’s stamina or strength after this:
On Saturday evening, he and Jill Biden went to Mass at Georgetown University, then stopped by the National Museum of American History and finally went out to dinner at the Red Hen restaurant….
But a few hours after midnight, Biden was spirited out of the mansion and taken to Joint Base Andrews….
The two journalists, Sabrina Siddiqui from The Wall Street Journal and Evan Vucci from The Associated Press, had been summoned to the White House on Friday and sworn to secrecy. They were told to wait for further information in an email whose subject line would read: “Arrival instructions for the golf tourney.”
….
The train pulled away from the station without ceremony at 9:37 p.m. and crossed the border into Ukraine around 10 p.m…..
Dressed in casual clothes, Biden had a hard time sleeping during the long train ride, according to a senior official who asked not to be identified describing the trip….
Talking with aides, Biden recounted his telephone call with Zelenskyy on Feb. 24 last year as Russia’s invasion began, marveling about how the Ukrainian leader told him at the time that he was not sure when they would speak again. Now, Biden mused to aides, here they were a year later about to meet face to face in Kyiv.
After the all-night trip, the train pulled into Kyiv-Pasazhyrsky station at 8 a.m. local time.
I can’t help but wonder if the codephrase for Biden’s daring visit to Ukraine, “Arrival instructions for the golf tourney,” was a dig at Trump’s love for golf. As President, Trump visited golf clubs 298 times, at a cost to taxpayers of about $144,000,000.
In 2018, Trump was so scared of rain that he refused to leave his hotel room in Paris and cancelled his scheduled visit to a ceremony just 60 miles away at a graveyard for fallen American soldiers in Normandy to commemorate the 100th anniversary Armistice Day just because it was raining, even though other world leaders braved the rain to attend.
In 2017, during a Group of Seven summit, the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan walked 700 yards to take a group photo at a piazza in a hilltop town, while Trump decided to wait until he could get a golf cart.
But a secret trip beginning at midnight, followed by days facing mortal danger with little sleep, including 21 hours on trains to and from Kyiv, were no big deal for “Amtrak Joe” Biden, who used to commute between DC and his home in Delaware when he was Senator and then Vice-President, and took over 8,200 Amtrak roundtrips, adding up to over 2 million miles.… I wonder if Biden also reflected on those Amtrak rides as he rode those trains in Ukraine.