The 27 must-see lines from Joe Biden's Time magazine interview

Here we go.

President Joe Biden doesn’t grant a whole lot of interviews to mainstream media organizations. In fact, he’s the first president in more than six decades(!) who hasn’t sat down with the New York Times for a formal interview.

That paucity of press means that when Biden does talk to the media, you need to pay VERY close attention.

Which brings me to an extended sit-down interview Biden did with Time magazine recently. To their immense credit, the good folks at Time published the entire transcript of the conversation online this morning.

You can read the whole thing here. Warning: It’s loooong. (A 28-minute read!) So, to save you time, I went through the full transcript and pulled out the most important lines from it. They’re below.

I know I am a broken record on this but I am, as far as I can tell, the only reporter who is going through these sorts of transcripts — from Biden, Donald Trump and other key politicians — with a fine-toothed comb. Consistently. And with an eye toward providing context, fact-checking and, yes, a little bit of humor too.

This work is important. What politicians say in interviews and speeches gives us critical guidance as to what they will do when they are in power.

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To the lines!

1. “And what I inherited, as a consequence of the mistake that we made in Afghanistan is a—was not a loss in Afghanistan, excuse my cold.”

Er, what? And away we go!

2. “For example, the idea that if when Putin decided to go into Russia—I mean, he's gonna go from Russia into Ukraine—the reason why I cleared the intelligence so we can release the information we knew that he was going to attack, was to let the world know we were still in charge.”

I get what Biden is saying here — he cleared the release of U.S. intelligence to make sure everyone knew Russian President Vladimir Putin was going to invade Ukraine. But, like, this is not a super clear way of saying that?

3. “The Russian military has been decimated. You don’t write about that. It’s been freaking decimated.”

Not decimated. “Freaking decimated.” Is this true? A Wall Street Journal story from December, relying on U.S. intelligence sources, claimed that 90% of Russia’s pre-war army has been destroyed.

4. “Number two, NATO is considerably stronger than it was when I took office. I put it together.”

“I.”

5. “I told him, he's gonna get not the Finlandization, the Natoization of Finland. And everybody thought, including you guys, thought I was crazy. And guess what? I did it. I did it.”

“Natoization” is definitely not a word. Also, this line makes clear that Biden believes deeply that he doesn’t get nearly enough credit from the media for his foreign policy accomplishments (or his accomplishments more generally) as he should.