Secretary of State Antony Blinken was visibly uncomfortable after President Joe Biden answered a question from the press on whether or not he would still consider Chinese President Xi Jinping a dictator.
“After today, would you still refer to President Xi as a dictator —a term that you used earlier this year?” Biden was asked.
“Well, look —he is! He’s a dictator in the sense that he’s a guy who runs a country, a Communist country, that is based on a form of government that’s totally different than ours,” Biden replied.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken was caught wincing at Biden’s use of the word “dictator.”
Watch the clip above.
From The New York Post:
Blinken, 61, physically recoiled and appeared to shake his head and fidget with his hands when Biden said Xi “is a dictator in the sense that he is the guy who runs the country that is a community country…based on a form of government different than ours” at a solo press conference.
The indelicate remark came shortly after Biden, 80, met with Xi for four hours in San Francisco ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference – marking the two leaders’ first in-person sit-down in a year.
Former Italian diplomat Marco Carnelos took to X to call out Blinken’s “desperate body language” in response to Biden’s statement.
“Twelve months of hard work & diplomacy thrown in the toilet with a simple word. WTF,” he wrote, followed by the face palm emoji.
Antony Blinken winces as Biden calls China’s Xi ‘dictator’ https://t.co/GXQVDxIoTs pic.twitter.com/6NdfUB44Yf
— New York Post (@nypost) November 16, 2023