WH Journos Start to Complain About Handlers Shielding Biden

BUCK: We have a Biden administration that is picking up on some things these days, maybe just starting to figure out that people don’t exactly have a tremendous amount of faith in Joe Biden’s ability to do complex reasoning around major policy and national security challenges. See what’s happened in Afghanistan. See what’s going on at the border.

And also, maybe Joe Biden is just what we’ve said all along: Not up for the job, too old, slowed down a little bit, just doesn’t have it. Because they’re certainly making it seem that way when they try to shield him from questions from the press corps. It has now gotten to the point where it’s not just Clay and me sitting here telling you, “Oh, but Biden won’t answer questions.”

The people who are usually the scribes of the regime when it’s a Democrat, the White House press corps, they’re even starting to complain about this a little bit. And here’s why. Here’s an example. Biden had a meeting with the Australian prime minister at the United Nations, and it is the kind of tradition that right afterwards usually the president will take a couple quick questions. Here’s how his handlers reacted in that instance.

BIDEN: … democracies of the world. (coughing) We’ve got a lot of work to do. So thank you all very much. (coughing)

REPORTERS: (shouting questions)

HANDLER: (shouting) Come on, guys. Thank you. All right, let’s go. Thank you. Thank you, guys!

BUCK: I could do that job, Clay, as one of the Biden handlers through the White House. “Thank you! Let’s go. Shut up! Shut up, everybody! No questions. Shut up! Shut up! We’re going! We’re going!” You could just see her escorting the feeble president stage left as quickly as possible.

CLAY: Did you see the data that over half of Americans now believe that Biden’s not mentally up to the job? And over half seems low. It’s a delicate position that they’re in, right? They’re in a Catch-22. Because if they allow Biden to field questions, he demonstrates that he’s not mentally capable of the job. If they don’t allow Biden to field questions, it demonstrates they don’t believe that he’s mentally capable of doing the job.

BUCK: And they’re not capable of doing their jobs, either, if they don’t allow Biden to answer questions. (chuckles)

CLAY: So I don’t know what the answer is here. Obviously, the answer is “have a mentally competent president.” But if you’re on the White House staff at this point, every time he takes a question — we know this, Buck, right? Like they gave him a list of who he’s a supposed to ask when he takes questions.

And then they tell him when he’s not supposed to take questions. We still don’t know who officially is telling him that, but it must be a consensus opinion of White House staff. Because when he takes questions, they are holding their breath. He called the prime minister of Australia… What did he say? “The fellow from down there” I think he called him? He couldn’t remember his name.

BUCK: “The fellow from down under,” I believe.

CLAY: “The fellow from down under.”

BUCK: Sounds like a very different show.

CLAY: Yeah. But that is a sign that he is totally without the ability to interact on anything other than scripted, and remember —

BUCK: We have another instance of this, Clay, though.

CLAY: Yeah, play that, too.

BUCK: It’s piling up, right? So we played that one time. He’s witting with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson.

CLAY: Who will talk to everybody.

BUCK: He’ll talk to everybody, has a very fancy accent, gets excited when he starts fielding questions and the reporters are happy because here you go, one of our closest allies with the president in the Oval Office, time to get some good sound bites. That’s why they’re there. Here is how the White House reacted in that situation.

JOHNSON: — interrupts or unbalances the Belfast Good Friday Accords. That’s the Belfast Good Friday Agreement. That’s the —

REPORTERS: (shouting questions)

HANDLER 1: Okay. Thank you! Let’s go! Thank you. Let’s go. Thank you.

HANDLER 2: Let’s go. Thank you.

FEMALE REPORTER: What did he say?

MALE REPORTER 1: I have no idea. (laughing) Hope the microphone got it.

MALE REPORTER 2: (laughing) Why didn’t any White House reporters get questions?

BUCK: I want everybody to hear it, Clay. I want everyone to hear it because this is… there we go. Yeah, they’re even complaining at the end, it is standard practice not only to allow there to be questions, they interrupted the prime minister of the U.K. as a guest of the president in the Oval Office to make sure there was no opportunity to pose more questions that would go to Biden or — I think this is what really happened is — I think they’re afraid that Biden might just like chime in and say something dumb so they’re just all, “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!”

CLAY: Oh, that’s totally what they believe. I mean, they are dodging bullets like Neo in The Matrix every time Joe Biden fields questions because I think they know that viral moment of incompetence that comes… Almost every time Biden takes questions on anything, there’s a 20- or 30-second or one-minute clip where you can go grab it and you can see: The lights are on but nobody’s home for this particular interaction.

BUCK: It’s so bad, Clay, that they’ve actually officially complained about it. The White House press pool has marched into Jen Psaki’s office — and this is an excerpt from their email to her. “The entire editorial component of the U.S. pool went immediately to Jen Psaki’s office…” I’m sorry. No.

This is a description of what they did “…to register a formal complaint that no American reporters were recognized for questions in the president’s Oval Office and that wranglers loudly shouted over the president as he seemed to give an answer to Ed O’Keefe’s question about the situation at the southern border. Biden’s answer could not be heard over the shouting.

“Psaki was unaware the incident had occurred and suggested she was not in a position to offer an immediate solution.” That’s Psaki saying, “Tough! Don’t you guys realize what you’re here to do? Our bidding. This is a Democrat administration. That’s what journos do: The bidding of Democrats.”

CLAY: Well, and remember — and I think we have to keep echoing this because it’s so significant. Trump would stand up and take questions, for better or worse, for hours from the media. And yet there were all these stories about how the 25th Amendment needed to be put in place because Trump didn’t have the mental faculties to do the job.

In fact, they even gave him that cognitive test that he took to prove that his mental faculties were up to the task of being president. For better or worse, Trump would talk to the media all the time. When’s the last time that Biden stood and took questions for an hour, Buck, like Trump would regularly do such that his communication team would finally just come up and say, “Okay.

“He’s literally exhausted every question that anybody had in the entire press corps”? I don’t think Biden has the physical or mental stamina to be capable of that, and that’s what this ushering of people out of the White House represents, and it gives you a sense of how unprecedented it is that the media there, Buck, is so furious. Even though they’re covering a Democratic president and even though they’re mostly left-wing media, they’re not even being allowed to do their jobs.

BUCK: Even they, I guess, have their limits for how much they’ll take.

CLAY: You take money out of their pocket, you take some food out of their mouth, they’ll complain.

BUCK: I also think, though, that there’s a sense among the press corps in D.C. right now that never before have so many Americans understood what a fraud political journalism is until the Trump years.

CLAY: Well, I think that’s true.

BUCK: So they have to at least go through the motions, right? (laughing) They have to at least get questions to the president when they’re in the Oval Office.

CLAY: All the things going on! All the failures. There’s so I am topics that Biden should have to answer for.

BUCK: Right. They can editorialize and play games around the coverage of those failures which is what they normally do, but when they’re not even in a position to… It’s like it’s not safe for a journalist covering politics in D.C. right now to be invited to the fancy cocktail parties later if they put Joe Biden in a position where he might answer an unscripted question.

I really do think that some of them are worried that they could get blamed. Others want to at least go through the motions because they realize that if they don’t get a question out there, what are they doing? How could they even pretend that they’re journalists, right? So look, it’s a tough place for some of these Democrats because you remember the Obama years?

It was just like every journalist in D.C. is walking around saying, “Everything’s amazing! The world is great.” But it wasn’t, as we know (chuckling), but that was the attitude. “Oh, let’s just hear more words of brilliance from Barack Obama!” They want that to be the atmosphere in D.C. right now.

I’ve got a lot of friends who cover politics on Capitol Hill and at the White House, but they know that propping this guy up… I mean, at some point the crazy emperor’s running around with no clothes on, and no one’s gonna believe otherwise.

CLAY: And it’s gonna get worse, Buck, because we’ve seen what the impact is of the stress of being president on otherwise relatively young and healthy people. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, how much older they looked when they left the White House versus when they came in. And it’s only gonna get worse for Biden at 78, 79, 80 years old as this continues.