Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author Chris Whipple spoke to Newsweek about his forthcoming book The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, which offers unique insights into the administration.
Whipple said that while his book was “unsparing” about mistakes Biden has made, he also lauded the president’s ability, highlighting his stance on Russian President Vladimir Putin and the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Biden enters the third year of his presidency “with the wind at his back” but “now comes the hard part.”
“If you can think of anything harder than confronting a once in a century pandemic and an invasion of a democracy in Europe and Trumpism, the third year is going to be even more difficult because he has to among other things, try to prevent a recession and tame inflation,” Whipple told Newsweek.
‘Uniquely Qualified’
Among the challenges, Whipple pointed to Biden’s efforts to rein in inflation, investigations by the new Republican House majority, Vladimir Putin, and in particular the war in Ukraine.
“When it comes to his handling of Ukraine, he was uniquely—almost uniquely qualified to handle that crisis,” Whipple said. “He trained for it his entire career. He’d taken the measure of the Kremlin’s and Russia’s leaders for decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He knew Putin and understood him, I think, better than Barack Obama or any of his predecessors.”
Whipple said Biden “never underestimated Putin.”
Biden and Churchill
“I think you can actually make an argument that he has something in common with Winston Churchill. I know Zelensky’s always been compared to Churchill, and perhaps rightly so for his courage and his eloquence,” he said, referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Whipple said that Biden and Churchill initially appear “completely dissimilar.”
“Churchill was a Tory [Conservative] with a silver tongue,” he said. “And Biden is really a lunch bucket, blue collar Democrat who mangles his words. And yet they were both considered washed up. Both Churchill and Biden had been mocked by their critics. They’d never quite succeeded in grasping the brass ring.”
However, when Germany started World War II “Churchill rose to that moment. And arguably when Ukraine was invaded Biden rose to meet the moment. So, I think you can make that comparison.”
Biden has played a major role in providing aid to Ukraine following the Russian invasion which began on February 24, 2022. Last week, the administration announced a new $2.85 billion drawdown in aid for Ukraine from the more than $3 billion in new military assistance intended for the country.
That $2.85 billion will be used to supply Ukraine with “Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, artillery systems, armored personnel carriers, surface to air missiles, ammunition, and other items to support Ukraine as it bravely defends its people, its sovereignty, and its territorial integrity,” according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The Threat of Trump
The Fight of His Life is a book almost as much about former President Donald Trump as it is about Biden, and Whipple told Newsweek that one of the “defining tests” of Biden’s presidency will be his handling of Trump.
“I think that facing down the threat of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement more broadly is also a real test of this presidency for which he’ll be judged by historians because this country faced a very serious—and still faces a very serious threat to democracy itself,” Whipple said.
“But in the end, I think maybe his biggest test is Ukraine,” he went on. “This was, again, an invasion of a democracy in the heart of Europe with the future of NATO at stake and even the prospect of nuclear war.”
“And so, it’s hard to imagine a more important test of the Biden presidency,” Whipple said. “And I think ultimately, it may be the thing that historians point to more than anything else.”
The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House (Scribner) is on sale January 17.
