When even the mainstream media can’t swallow the White House line on the explanation of a gaffe, the president may be in trouble.
Joe Biden’s concerning — even frightening — moment where he lost his sense of reality last week at the White House Conference on hunger is still a topic of interest in the briefing room.
Biden called out the name of Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) who died in an auto accident the previous month, wanting to acknowledge her efforts to combat hunger. As a gaffe, it was nothing unusual for Biden. But press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refused to acknowledge that it was a mistake, saying 14 times that Biden had Walorski “top of mind” because he was going to meet her family later in the week.
This is painful to watch.
“Karine had a really tough assignment, and I don’t necessarily hold her responsible. I think that she had a job to do, which was to try and mitigate and lessen this and spin it. When, overall, the White House should have just been like, ‘Yeah, the president made a mistake,'” the second reporter said. “I think that the failure here was doubling down rather than just admitting that he made a mistake.”
The response online was blistering, too, with even reporters from mainstream and liberal outlets taking shots at Jean-Pierre. While CNN and MSNBC ignored Biden’s mistake and the subsequent spin effort on the air, it got considerable attention in print.
This is not KJP’s doing entirely. She is handed her marching orders by White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield and her team, who apparently decided that the public line on the gaffe was to “explain” that the president had Walorski “top of mind” — and nothing else. No other statement was permitted. She would look like an idiot, but that was better than Biden looking old and confused.
This was a decision that the communications team probably kicked all the way up to the Oval Office and Biden’s top aides.
“They do not want to have this conversation and appear clueless or even offended when you ask about it,” the first White House reporter told Fox News Digital.
“These moments of confusion are happening with increasing frequency,” another journalist said later in the briefing about Biden. “Americans are watching this and are having concerns.” Jean-Pierre shot back that she was being “rude” to her colleagues.
The first reporter told Fox News Digital that the moment may have led her to lose some credibility in the eyes of the room.
I would love to be a fly on the wall in the Kremlin right now, listening to them weigh the decision on whether or not to go nuclear in Ukraine. They are faced with something Russian policymakers contemplating nuclear strategy have never faced before: a president with his finger on 6,000 nuclear weapons yet who is mentally impaired.
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