If left-leaning CBS really wants to get under Donald Trump’s skin, they would interview Nikki Haley during the Super Bowl.
She could fill the hole created by President Biden who declined the network’s invitation for a pre-game softball interview before millions of viewers, an event that has become sort of a presidential tradition.
It is the second year in a row that the 81-year-old gaffe-prone president has turned the offer down.
If he were an NFL player, Biden would have been put on the team’s PUP list, which is the designation for a player deemed physically unable to perform.
Or, in Biden’s case, given his latest gaffe in a pointless and rambling 2021 story about talking with French President Francois Mitterrand, he would be eligible to be on the imagined MUP list –mentally unable to perform. Mitterrand died in 1996.
Given Biden’s disastrous press conference Thursday night over the special counsel report on his fading memory and the classified documents stored in his garage, it is no wonder why he is kept under wraps. Another performance like that and they will throw a net over him.
Speaking in Las Vegas earlier, Biden recounted a story he has told before, only this time he confused the late Mitterrand with current French President Emmanuel Macron.
“I sat down and said, ‘America is back,’” Biden recalled. “And Mitterrand from Germany — I mean from France — looked at me and said, ‘Well how long are you back for?’”
Then, at a New York fundraiser, he said had talked to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the same meeting. But Kohl also had been dead, passing in 2017.
A president talking to dead people is a problem.
Thursday night he confused Egypt with Mexico.
It is understandable why Biden’s handlers want to keep the president away from reporters, even if they are in the tank like the three major television networks — CBS, ABC and NBC.
Biden gives no in-depth interviews, holds few press conferences, and answers no questions, unless they are shouted at him over the din of the presidential helicopter.
Biden, normally a garrulous politician, has yet to address the nation over the invasion of the southern border, for instance, let alone his belated bombing campaign against Iranian terrorist proxies in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, or the wars in Ukraine or the fighting in Gaza.
And it is not as though Biden would have been asked any serious questions by the CBS interviewing crew. But Biden is not even up to the task of dealing with pre-arranged softballs.
Still, trailing Donald Trump in the polls, an interview would have given Biden the opportunity to appear at an event that is probably the highest-watched network extravaganza of the year.
It would have given Biden the chance to go after Trump at the same time.
Trump, who knows something about television, said, “I would be happy to replace him.”
So wouldn’t Nikki Haley, particularly as she came off a surprise appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live in which she mocked Trump over his age and mental competency.
It was a curious performance, and it did little to help her win Republican primary voters in her effort to stay relevant against Trump who has the GOP presidential nomination locked up. Haley was even embarrassed in the Nevada primary.
Trump is also comfortably ahead of Haley in South Carolina where she served two terms as governor. That GOP primary is Feb. 24.
Still, the anti-Trump executives who run SNL loved Haley’s attack on Trump.
But any chance that Nikki Haley could somehow end up as Doanld Trump’s running mate went from slim to none.
Talk about burning bridges.
The one thing you do not do is mock Donald Trump.
Which is exactly what Haley did.
Hardly had Haley stepped off the stage than Trump named two people as possible running mates, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem.
Flattery may get you somewhere in politics. Mocking Trump gets you nowhere.
Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.