Though many news platforms claim that President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama’s “friendship is well-documented,” reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns allege there is a longstanding and ongoing “rivalry.”
Martin and Burns, reporters with The New York Times, made their claim on the Monday broadcast of CNN’s “New Day.”
CNN host John Berman asked about the Biden-Obama relationship as Martin and Burns were discussing the release of their new book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future.”
Reporter Nora Neus tweeted an excerpt of the book:
“For all the talk Biden and Obama do about brothers, they’re not that close. They don’t talk super often today. There’s a rivalry there.”
Burns shared that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly said that Obama was “jealous” of the media’s presentation of Biden’s first-year accomplishments. He said:
“Pelosi told a friend that she believed that Obama was jealous of Joe Biden, and this is after the passage of the American Rescue Plan, it’s when he had unveiled his plans for infrastructure spending, more social welfare spending, climate spending, and has all this coverage of, you know, ‘Joe Biden, more transformational even than Barack Obama.'”
Burns continued: “And we heard over and over again that really bothered Barack Obama, and that he would call up people and say, ‘listen, you gotta understand, I was dealing with a different Democratic Party, and I had more conservative Democrats.'”
Watch:
Martin interjected: “For all the talk Biden and Obama do about being brothers and good friends, they’re actually not that close. They don’t talk super often today; there’s a rivalry there.”
Martin continued: “Biden was always a prideful guy, and he knew he was looked down upon when he was in the White House when he was VP, and he loved the idea of being a bigger historical figure than Obama and for a few months there in 2021, it’s like he had the possibility to do that.”
Rumblings of a rivalry also surfaced last month when Fox News contributor Kat Timpf stated that Obama does not follow Biden on Instagram, noting it “could be a sign of polite indifference.”
While describing the relationship between Obama and Biden, Timpf said: “It’s like if you used to be really close with somebody and then something happens and you’re not anymore, and then you have to see them out somewhere and they treat you with this polite indifference.”
Timpf added, “It is so painful, you’ve gotta like, play it cool, and then just listen to ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac on the way home.”
Last month, when former President Obama visited the White House and virtually all guests ignored President Biden, the New York Post ran a headline that read: “President Biden blatantly disrespected on his own turf.”
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