White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denied the remarks were scripted.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at President Biden’s softball MSNBC interview amid calls from his fellow Democrats to exit the presidential race, and cover more media misses.
Joe Biden Is Hanging on for Dear Life
Despite calls to step aside and make way for a younger, healthier Democratic presidential candidate, President Biden affirmed yet again on Monday morning that he is “not going anywhere.”
Part of the campaign’s plan to stay in the race despite growing concern among voters that Biden is too old and lacking the mental acuity to continue serving in office is to have Biden appear at more casual, unscripted events.
Yet his first post-debate TV interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos did little to assuage viewers’s concerns last week — even according to Biden’s own former press secretary, Jen Psaki, who called the appearance just “okay.” The worst moments of the interview included when Biden confusingly could not say for certain whether he had watched the debate afterward and the rambling answer he offered when asked if he knew during the debate how poorly it was going.
He also told Stephanopoulos he would only end his campaign if the Lord Almighty came down and told him to.
So, on Monday, Biden sought friendlier ground in an interview on one of his favorite programs, MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
He called in for an 18-minute softball interview in which he oftentimes shouted and struck a defiant tone.
“But if any of these guys — don’t think I should run, run against me. Go ahead, announce — announce they’re president. Challenge me at the convention,” Biden said.
At times he was unintelligible: “But the fact of the matter is, how can you assure you’re going to be out on, you know, … on your way to go to, you know, work tomorrow? Age – age wasn’t, you know, the idea that I’m too old.”
Scarborough asked Biden what he would say to Democrats who are concerned about his comments to Stephanopolous last week that he would be OK with losing to former president Donald Trump as long as he tried his best. But the host graciously began the question by pointing out the “contrast” between grassroots supporters showing up for Biden in Pennsylvania on Sunday against the list of “Washington insiders and Hollywood moguls” that want him to drop out of the race.
Even Scarborough himself has been back and forth on the Biden age issue.
The host claimed just last month, “I have spent a good bit of time talking to Kevin McCarthy through the years and hours with Biden in 2024. There is no comparison: Biden is far sharper, more intellectually curious, and far more insightful on global affairs than any House GOP speaker I have met over 30 years.”
He then did a quick post-debate about-face, questioning whether Biden should remain in the race. “If he were CEO and he turned in a performance like that, would any corporation in America, any Fortune 500 corporation in America keep him on as CEO?” he asked.
However, he later called on Democrats to “take a deep breath” and “honor” Biden by not forcing him to drop out “in haste.”
The interview on Monday left viewers wondering if Biden’s responses had been scripted. Asked whether that was the case during Monday afternoon’s press briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted that Biden was speaking “from his heart.”
“The president was very clear there was no script at all and he was very detailed. You heard him say actually during the call that he was reading some quotes,” she said, saying that while Biden was reading quotes from the debate, he was not reading from a script.
At points in the interview, Biden could seemingly be heard turning pages of notes and said, “I’m reading from a list.” That still didn’t stop him from confusingly saying that he knows Trump called deceased American military members “suckers and losers” because “I was with him!” despite the quote having come from reporting in The Atlantic that Trump has vehemently denied.
Yet viewers cannot be blamed for wondering what favorable advantages Biden may have been given going into the interview after two radio hosts came forward last week to say they had been given a pre-selected set of questions by Biden’s team in advance of their own interviews with the president.
Philadelphia radio station WURD severed ties with radio host Andrea Lawful-Sanders over the weekend after telling CNN’s Victor Blackwell that she received a list of eight questions before her interview with Biden on July 3. She approved four of the eight questions and asked them during the radio interview with Biden.
The White House helped draft the questions, which the Biden campaign then sent to WURD, according to Axios.
“WURD Radio is not a mouthpiece for the Biden or any other Administration,” WURD Radio president and CEO Sara Lomax said in a statement on Sunday. “Internally, we will commit to reviewing our policies, procedures, and practices to reinforce WURD’s independence and trust with our listeners. But mainstream media should do its own introspection to explore how they have lost the trust of so many Americans, Black Americans chief among them.”
Milwaukee radio host Earl Ingram also interviewed Biden following the debate and revealed to ABC News that he “was given some questions for Biden.” Ingram confirmed that he used four of the five questions that were sent.
And yet the hand-selected questions still couldn’t save Biden from making an embarrassing gaffe; during the WURD interview, he mistakenly described himself as the “first black woman to serve with a black president.”
Headline Fail of the Week
Americans need look no further than a headline from the Associated Press just last week to see the embarrassing spin the media has performed on Biden’s behalf.
“Biden at 81: Sharp and focused but sometimes confused and forgetful,” the AP reported after the president’s debate performance.
Yet the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson claims there is an “extraordinary effort from alt/right commentators to claim that legacy media lied to strategically cover up the issue of Biden’s age and only suddenly covered the subject.”
Thompson said in a post on X that it’s both “fascinating” and “jarring” to watch people he respects express the idea, seemingly dismissing it as conspiracy fodder.
Media Misses
– Bloomberg editor Molly Smith may be on to something here:
no wonder nobody knows what’s going on in this economy 🤷♀️ pic.twitter.com/XUyGFnf4xo
— Molly Smith (@MollySmithNews) July 5, 2024
– The Washington Post editorial board wrote a strange hypothetical withdrawal speech on Biden’s behalf last week. “A large part of me still wants to stay in the fight,” the imagined speech would say. “But, at this moment, the nation needs something I cannot provide: a leader with the energy to run a vigorous campaign and then to work for America, at all hours, for the next four years.”
-New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi received widespread criticism last week for seemingly sitting on her bombshell reporting about Biden’s cognitive decline. Nuzzi published “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden,” on July 4, in which she reports that Biden supporters have been expressing doubt about his ability to run for reelection since at least January. In April, she said Biden looked like “something not of this earth” when she saw him during an appearance. He looked so frail, in fact, that his appearance at the debate exceeded her expectations. Biden’s “mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters,” she reports, adding that some high-powered Democrats were concerned privately that Biden “may not really be the acting president after all.” Readers wondered why it took Nuzzi seven months to report what she first heard in January, or even three months to reveal what she saw with her own eyes in April.