You too, John?
That is what former President Joe Biden must be asking about his former best buddy, John Kerry.
It is not exactly like Julius Caesar uttering “Et Tu, Brute?” as his former good friend and ally, Marcus Junius Brutus, sword in hand, joined others to finish Caesar off at the Roman Senate in 44 B.C.
Even if it did not happen quite that way, it is the way William Shakespeare wrote that it happened, so it will have to do.
Besides, it fits.
Biden’s former friends and allies, like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and others, have, metaphorically speaking, turned on Biden the way Brutus and his gang turned on Caesar.
Joe Biden was, of course, no Julius Caesar. He only ended up dead — politically speaking — when his former friends and colleagues in the Democrat Party turned on him, pushed him aside and made him an instant has-been.
This now includes John Kerry. He was the friend and colleague whom Biden appointed as the country’s first climate czar.
Now he has joined the others by observing that Donald Trump was “right” about securing the border and that Biden, by implication, was wrong.
The climate czar cabinet-level appointment allowed Kerry to staff up and travel the world at taxpayers’ expense in private jet plane luxury to lecture everyone on saving the planet he was helping pollute.
Before that Kerry, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2004, served alongside Biden in the Senate for 24 years. He succeeded Biden as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden became vice president.
Kerry also served as Secretary of State under the Obama/Biden presidency.
Kerry also played a significant role in Biden’s 2020 campaign for president, in which he ousted then-President Donald Trump.
How close were the two men?
“The only team that has worked more closely than the two of us is Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.” Kerry quipped while campaigning for Biden in 2020.
In 2024, Biden awarded Kerry the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.
So, it came as a surprise to many that Kerry, at this late stage in the game, would come out of nowhere to criticize Biden for his handling — or mishandling — of the border and the immigration crisis that helped send Trump back to the White House for a second term.
With Joe Biden out of power and down for the count, Kerry could not have chosen a better — or worse — time to join the gang of former Biden friends and fans beating up on him.
It is sad. Not only was Biden forced to pull out of his race for reelection because of his mental acuity problem, but his administration is under investigation over who was making the decisions during his faltering presidency.
And unlike past presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Biden has failed to capitalize financially — or turn a decent buck — on his presidency.
He is not being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for giving speeches that nobody listens to or writing books that nobody reads. Nor is he raising millions of dollars for a presidential library like the others have done.
So, it had to hurt when Kerry, in a BBC interview, said: “He was right,” referring to Trump on securing the border to halt the illegal immigration invasion of the country.
“The problem that we all should have been right,” Kerry said. “The first thing any president should say, any president, or anybody in public life, is, without a border protected, you don’t have a nation.
“I wish President Biden had been heard more often saying, “’I’m going to enforce the law,’” Kerry said.
Instead, Biden flaunted the law by opening the border, keeping it unprotected and letting in millions of unvetted strangers.
Kerry should have given Biden that advice when it counted and not criticize him when Biden is down and out. It shows that there are no true friends in politics, only associates.
Maybe Biden can take the presidential medal back.
Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas can be reached at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com
