President Biden made the media roll his eyes on Tuesday after repeating a story often told: that he told Russian leader Vladimir Putin in the face in 2011 that he had no soul.
ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos asked Biden about Putin during a lengthy interview, where Biden also said that Putin was a “murderer” and that he “would pay a price” for interfering in elections in the United States.
Biden also claimed that he looked Putin in the eye and said that he did not have a “soul”, to which Putin replied: “we understand each other”.
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A year later, however, Biden defeated the 2012 Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, by calling Russia the United States’ main geopolitical opponent. Biden said that Romney has a “Cold War mentality”, while then President Barack Obama told Russia at the time that he would have greater “flexibility” to work with the country after his election.
“No way is this going to happen in real life,” tweeted Rebecca Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute about Biden’s story.
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Some vehicles were more credulous, however, with The Daily Beast describing Biden as “extraordinarily outspoken” about his Russian counterpart.
Biden has been criticized by the media before for telling selfish anecdotes that are proven wrong or highly unlikely. This includes countless details in an apocryphal story of giving a soldier a medal for heroism in Afghanistan, a false claim that he was once “arrested” while trying to see Nelson Mandela in South Africa and a claim that he saw two men kissing in Wilmington, Del., in 1959, to which he said his father said to him, “Joey, they love each other.”
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Biden would politically oppose gay marriage until 2012, but he told the story after the Obama administration changed its position and the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was legal in 2015.