There are moments in politics when the mask slips, and a small scene in a crowded room tells the larger truth. ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl says the truth about former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden isn’t tension or distance — it’s that things are “really bad.”
On Katie Couric’s podcast last week, Karl described a quiet but telling tableau in Washington, D.C.
Obama and Biden, once joined at the hip, found themselves at Café Milano — that diplomatic salon disguised as a restaurant — their security teams practically brushing past one another. Yet the two men never met eyes.
“They didn’t interact at all? They were in the same restaurant?” Couric asked Karl. “What’s their relationship like?”
“Really bad. Really bad,” Karl replied. “Biden and the people around him very much blame Barack Obama for the effort to push Biden out of the campaign.”
Karl is out promoting Retribution, his behind-the-scenes account of the historic 2024 election, and he does not soften the edges of what he calls a Democratic civil war. He brought up another painful memory: Hunter Biden watching Obama take his father by the arm and guide him offstage at a fundraiser last summer — a gesture meant as help but received as humiliation, at a moment when the party was still insisting the president was strong.
“It’s not a good relationship. If they had wanted to see each other, they absolutely would have,” Karl said of the Café Milano non-encounter, a scene first reported by Politico.
And even after that, the fracture widened. Karl noted that Biden — like Kamala Harris — had to work the phones himself, calling and cajoling, trying to secure support for Harris after he gave up the nomination last year.
Watch the clip below:
