LIMA — Lame-duck President Biden was relegated to the back corner of the APEC conference’s annual family photo — as Chinese President Xi Jinping was honored with a front-and-center position next to the host country’s President Dina Boluarte.
The petty humiliation of America’s leader comes ahead of his Saturday afternoon meeting with Xi — who has been feted with relative pomp throughout the event as thanks for his country’s financing of a large new port on Peru’s coast.
Biden, 81, whose increasing irrelevance domestically and on the world stage has earned him the moniker of “super lame duck,” arrived last to the family photo before taking his pre-decided position between the fellow back-row leaders of Thailand and Vietnam.
It’s unclear why exactly Biden was put in the back row. A review of past APEC family photos shows various positions for American leaders, with Barack Obama and George W. Bush at times also appearing in the rear — though then-President Donald Trump took a center spot in a pair of family photos in 2017 for the APEC summit in Vietnam.
The president-elect, who is expected to readopt his forceful “America first” posture, was known during his term of office not to take even symbolic snubs — in one instance pushing his way to the front of a world leaders scrum before the press to ensure his and America’s spot in the fore.
Biden’s trip has featured several small humiliations so far — including a grandiose welcome for Xi and a noticeably lighter official greeting for the commander in chief when Air Force One arrived in South America Thursday for the 21-nation summit of the Pacific rim countries.
The outgoing US leader, who traveled with his daughter Ashley and granddaughter Natalie, will head to Brazil on Sunday for an aerial tour of the Amazon rainforest before participating in the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro.
Before leaving Peru, Biden will meet with Xi for the third and final time of his presidency.
US officials say that Biden is expected to tout their work to “responsibly” manage US-China relations and to hail a decline in fentanyl overdose deaths after Xi agreed at a meeting last year to restrict exports of the potent synthetic opioid.
An estimated 223,000 Americans died from the mostly China-sourced synthetic opioid in Biden’s first three years in office and Republicans blasted him for not doing more earlier to halt the flow.
Trump, 78, has threatened to renew his tariff-driven trade war with China, which during his first term, was waged in an attempt to broker a new economic pact that would benefit American companies.
The Republican president-elect also has called for a global reparations conference on COVID-19 in which the Chinese government could be given a bill into the trillions for its role in the origins of the pandemic that killed more than 1 million Americans.
Trump last year floated forcing China to pay $50 trillion in “reparations” for the virus, which parts of the US government, including the FBI, believe originated with a lab leak at a lab in Wuhan.
Biden’s presidency featured Republican accusations that he was too soft on China due to millions of dollars paid to his brother James Biden and son Hunter Biden during and immediately after his eight-year vice presidency.
Those payments were the subject of an impeachment inquiry that concluded that Biden misused his prior position to enrich his family, though the House abandoned the probe and did not vote on articles of impeachment after Biden ended his reelection bid in July.
A 2017 email recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop penciled in a 10% cut for the “big guy” in a proposed joint venture between Biden family associates and a Chinese government-linked energy company.
Trump claimed last year that Biden “was bribed and now he’s being blackmailed” by Beijing and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told The Post that Biden was “soft” on China and that “it probably has something to do with business relationships and may very well involve Hunter and James Biden and some of the deals they made over there.”