In one respect, the team was successful: They convinced the press to cover for Biden’s decline for years after his collapse became clear.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the Biden administration’s unwarranted bragging and we cover more media misses.
Biden Team Takes an Undeserved Victory Lap In Its Final Days
With just two weeks left until the end of the Biden administration, the team is standing by its rocky record – and even celebrating it in some cases.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed this week that her communications team is “the best in the business,” earning her some well-deserved criticism from conservatives on social media:
As Washington Times columnist Tim Murtaugh wrote, “This ‘best team in the business’ lied to the world about the mental & physical fitness of the president and, ultimately, failed. Their work led to Trump’s huge win, which was a complete repudiation of everything they did in the most important jobs they’ll ever have.”
And who could forget her ace team’s repeated false assurances that Biden would not pardon his son Hunter.
Fox News recapped some of Jean-Pierre’s greatest hits:
Memorable moments included her igniting a feud with CBS reporter Ed O’Keefe after she refused to answer his query about neurologist from Walter Reed Military Medical Center visiting Biden at the White House several times that year; saying that questioning Biden’s inflammatory rhetoric about then-candidate Donald Trump after he was almost assassinated twice was itself “incredibly dangerous”; and dismissing videos of Biden looking frail as “cheap fakes.”
In one respect, Jean-Pierre and the rest of the White House communications team do have something to be proud of: They managed to convince mainstream reporters to ignore their eyes and ears and insist on Biden’s mental acuity years after it had become clear that he was no longer fit for purpose.
While Americans got their first glimpse at Biden’s deterioration during the Biden-Trump presidential debate in June, we only learned the full truth when the Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report last month about how the White House has been managing to function with a “diminished” Biden.
The report claims aides were often left to repeat instructions to Biden at events that “would be obvious to the average person,” including where to enter or exit a stage, and that Biden’s schedule was adjusted to accommodate his advanced age, as he would become tired if meetings ran long and would make mistakes. On Biden’s off days, meetings could be canceled altogether, the report said.
And even in cases where the Biden campaign printed pre-approved questions on notecards, Biden still “made flubs, which confounded the donors who knew that Biden had the questions ahead of time.”
It’s no wonder then, that Biden held just 14 solo press conferences, compared to 44 for Trump in his first term and 65 for President Obama over the course of two terms.
Having confirmation that Biden’s abilities were perhaps even worse than feared has left critics to wonder how Biden led the country through the last four years, particularly during key events like the administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left 13 Americans dead.
Yet this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was unapologetic about the removal in an interview with the New York Times when an interviewer asked how the Afghanistan “failure” damaged America’s credibility.
“First, I make no apologies for ending America’s longest war. This, I think, is a signal achievement of the president’s. The fact that we will not have another generation of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan, that’s an important achievement in and of itself,” Blinken said, leading Times interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro to push back and point out that the Taliban has since taken over and has made life much more difficult for women in the country.
“In every possible way, the manner in which this was done and the state in which Afghanistan has been left could not have been what the United States desired,” Garcia-Navarro said.
“There was never going to be an easy way to extricate ourselves from 20 years of war. I think the question was what we were going to do moving forward from the withdrawal. We also had to learn lessons from Afghanistan itself,” Blinken said.
The Biden administration also has some champions outside the White House, including CNN contributor Karen Finney, who claimed Biden’s record “will stand the test of time.”
“I think in the longer term, we will remember that this is a president and vice president who helped us come back from the brink during COVID, when people were dying by the hundreds of thousands on a daily basis,” Finney said during an appearance on CNN. “We were in our homes, and companies and small businesses were falling off a cliff, and he helped to get vaccines, get us out of our homes, get us back to work and invested in this country.”
(It’s worth noting that much of the work that was done to reopen society and get vaccines to the public was done under President Trump.)
Finney did, however, acknowledge that critics have rightfully called out the concealment of Biden’s lagging mental acuity.
“It was very disturbing to learn late in the year about just how poor his health has become. And I, like many, did not realize that it had gotten to that point,” Finney said. “That being said, I think . . . he showed up for the job. He got the work done. I think some of the accomplishments also in the Middle East and foreign policy will also stand the test of time.”
CNN’s resident conservative commentator, Scott Jennings, pushed back, arguing Biden is “going to leave office in disgrace,” citing the Hunter pardon, inflation, and the Afghanistan withdrawal.
And Biden’s record on the border crisis is so bad that even MSNBC was left to admit that his handling of the issue wasn’t his “finest moment.”
Former Obama official Steve Rattner appeared on Morning Joe and discussed a chart showing that nearly four times as many illegal immigrants crossed the border under Biden compared to Trump at one point.
“The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly,” Rattner said. “You can see what happened here. Trump is not wrong when he talks about how border crossings were quite low. They’re running about 74,000 a month when he left office. They, in fact, did shoot up. Some of it was some things Biden said, and some was they put a moratorium, for example, on deportations. But, in fact, we did get up here almost to 300,000 a month.”
In December 2023, migrant border crossings reached a record of more than 302,000 encounters.
“What maybe people don’t entirely know is that border crossings have come back down almost to where they were under Trump,” Rattner said. “They’re running about 100,000 at the moment. We went up the hill and went down the hill, but, unfortunately, that was costly to Biden during the election.”
Headline Fail of the Week
Mistakes are often made in the early reporting of breaking news incidents, but several news outlets made easily preventable poor headline choices in the wake of the New Orleans terror attack, which left 14 people dead and at least 30 others wounded.
Both the BBC and CBS News embarrassingly relied upon passive voice, crafting headlines that seemed to suggest a wild car had acted alone to drive through the crowd on Bourbon Street.
“Casualties feared after vehicle hits crowd in New Orleans,” the BBC reported. CBS News, meanwhile, wrote, “Reported fatalities in New Orleans as vehicle apparently slams into Bourbon Street crowd.”
Becket Adams writes for NR:
Kneejerk contrarians argue that the press should be praised for its caution, deeming it noble. Reporters shouldn’t say anything of the person behind the wheel of the vehicle because doing so may imply intent. What if the driver was merely drunk or disoriented? What then?
Sure, but why not just say “driver”? Are we supposed to hold out for the possibility that a vehicle somehow found a hill in New Orleans and rolled its way to Bourbon Street?
Furthermore, this weak defense of the press ignores the facts as they unfolded in New Orleans on January 1. When CBS, the BBC, and others published headlines suggesting a vehicle had attacked revelers, it had already been confirmed that the driver engaged in a brief firefight with the police. Are we also expected to consider the possibility that the gun somehow discharged on its own?
Media Misses