Joe Biden was news on all kinds of topics yesterday, a stimulating reminder of what can happen when a president changes speeches and photo shoots to answer journalistic questions.
And then there was the ex-guy, who cleared up some doubts with his longest television interview since he left office.
In “Good Morning America”, George Stephanopoulos pressed Biden repeatedly, including on some uncomfortable topics, and the president, with cards in hand, came prepared to generate some headlines.
The ABC meeting convinced me that Biden took the wrong turn by refusing to give a press conference until a week from today. He was fine, he didn’t digress or make a faux pas or accidentally set off a nuclear confrontation. And even if he did (except for the last one), that’s a small price to pay for getting his message out loud.
Either Biden’s team is being overly protective or the new president has misjudged the value of using interviews to set the agenda. And by the way, it’s very easy for a president to refine questions he doesn’t want to answer, like Biden, about whether to withdraw more troops from Afghanistan or what price Vladimir Putin will pay for meddling in the 2020 elections.
The president was clearly ready to throw Andrew Cuomo under the bus. He started with the sure Democratic position that if the allegations of sexual harassment are proven to be true, the governor should step down. But then Biden, twice, raised an even darker spectrum: “It may well be that there may be a criminal case.”
It was like a sign of a giant bat sweeping Gotham City. For the party’s leader, the president of the United States, raising the prospect of Cuomo going to jail means more than all the combined calls for Democrats to step down. This cementes the impression that Cuomo’s party wants him to leave, even though only 35% of New Yorkers in a new poll agree.
And Biden may have had a New York Times story about the governor and his advisers trying to discredit the first accuser, Lindsey Boylan, by saying that women who come forward should not be “scapegoats” or “victimized”.
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The most important exchange was at the border, the first with the president since the migration crisis got out of hand, due to a lack of media engagement.
The ABC anchor asked the key question: “Was it a mistake not to anticipate this increase?”
Biden sidestepped saying that Trump had his own outbreaks and he, unlike his predecessor, is not separating the children from their parents.
Stephanopoulos was a little concerned that Biden was actually telling these refugees to cross the border. “I can tell you clearly, don’t come,” said Biden. What is more important are their actions, which are allowing unaccompanied minors to enter Texas without having facilities to house them.
And when the president said he would see to it that migrants apply for asylum from their home countries, Stephanopoulos should have reminded viewers that this was Trump’s policy, which Biden ended.
Still, the two men got what they wanted in the interview. Maybe Joe was comfortable because he has no doubt known George since his days at the Clinton White House.
Trump may also have gotten what he wanted with a call to Maria Bartiromo on Tuesday night: to publicize his record and destroy his successor for half an hour.
He said, for example, that Biden will spend “the biggest tax increase in our country’s history to pay for everything”. Biden says that only those who earn more than $ 400,000 will pay more.
At the border, Trump ignored his own problems with waves of migrants – and criticisms of his family separation policy: “So, we had very few people coming in and we also stopped human trafficking. When I say we stopped, it made a tremendous tooth, like never been done before …
“They are leaving them and entering our country. It is a shame. They will destroy our country if they do not do something about it.”
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The 45th president thanked the Washington Post for correcting a false story about him telling a senior Georgia election official to “find the fraud” (unfortunately, he was asked wrongly about his connection with the Georgia secretary of state, that the Post reported accurately based on an audio recording). And that took him back to his unproven allegations of electoral fraud and how America looked like a Third World country:
“Our Supreme Court and our courts did not have the courage to annul elections that should have been annulled because you are talking about decisive amounts, hundreds of thousands and even millions of votes that they did not have.”
An interview with a former president is, almost by definition, more backward, and Trump did not generate much coverage. Maybe he’ll start appearing on the air more often to compete with Biden. But whether these interviews remain highly interesting as his time on the job dwindles – unless Trump declares for 2024 – is an open question.