connect with

“I wanted to make sure I could connect with him.”

Joe feels it would be meaningful for him to connect with the few remaining veterans and for a divided country to be reminded of its lost unity.

“At one point, I connected with this kind of spasmodic face and animalistic expression of pleasure coming out of him that’s uncontrollable because he just killed someone. We played with that kind of deviant behavior because it’s not easy to connect with a character that is so far away from us.”

While the sport's suits warn gravely about demographic collapse and the need to connect with a younger audience, a 28-year-old sevens player from a nation where rugby is barely a blip on the radar has apparently cracked it.

As the old curse has it, we are living in interesting times, made more interesting by Biden’s inability to connect with millions of Americans who — if spoken to plainly and directly — would probably empathize with his decision.