When President Joe Biden took office in January, his administration pledged to “bring truth and transparency” back to relations with the press. The latter regularly complained about the lack of respect shown by former President Donald Trump, whom they painted as a dictator with a hostile attitude who simply hated the independent journalists simply trying to engage in fair reporting, even though it was often anything but. With “orange man bad” gone, the media rejoiced at the prospect of America again becoming a “beacon of free press,” as Foreign Relations magazine put it.
Yet, the Biden-press honeymoon was short-lived, as the president turned out not as transparent and easily accessible as he was expected to be. Very soon, it became a common knowledge that the few questions Biden takes from the press are pre-approved beforehand, and all the reporters he calls on are pre-selected. And if Joe Biden, the leader of the free world, takes the liberty to call on someone not on the list, he’d “get in trouble.” Presumably operating out of compassion for their boss, the White House staff strives to keep Biden out of trouble — whatever that is — so the press is being shooed out of the room before the president goes off-script.
This is precisely what happened on Tuesday, when the U.S. President met with the U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the Oval Office.
After discussing such issues as the new AUKUS alliance (the U.S.–UK–Australia nuclear submarine deal) announced last week, trade, the Afghanistan withdrawal, climate change, and the international COVID vaccine rollout, the British PM did a routine thing that national leaders do: He wanted to take questions from the press.
“Would it be OK if we had a couple of questions? Just a couple?” Johnson asked, to which Biden responded: “Good luck.” Then, Johnson took three questions from the British reporters, and they asked the PM about the case of Harry Dunn, the British teen killed in a crash in the U.K. two years ago, and trade.
As the video clip of the incident shows, when Johnson was still speaking, the White House wranglers interrupted his speech mid-sentence and started to shout at the reporters to leave the room. Amid the commotion and yelling, Biden, who was wearing a mask, sat in his chair for several seconds idly before making a motion with his hand as Johnson looked amazed.
As hard as it is to make sense out of the cacophony in the Oval Office, apparently, CBS News reporter Ed O’Keefe asked the president about the situation on the southern border, where thousands of Haitian refugees were flooding into the country. But with all the shouting and because of the mask muffling the president’s words, his answer was “undecipherable,” per O’Keefe.
Right after the incident, White House Correspondents’ Association President Steven Portnoy issued a statement that he filed a formal complaint to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki over the administration’s handling of the press.
According to American Greatness, the statement read:
The entire editorial component of the US pool went immediately into Jen Psaki’s office 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.
Psaki, according to the statement, was unaware of the incident and could not “offer any immediate solutions.”
Portnoy also said he requested another press conference with the president, citing how Biden routinely ignores reporters’ questions and “provide[s] a lack of transparency with the press.” To that, Psaki noted that the president takes questions “several times a week.” She, presumably, did not provide any details on how to get on the list of approved people who are allowed to ask those questions.
The outrage from the press over such treatment was palpable, and the Daily Wire collected some of the social-media posts of reporters. Among them is Ashley Parker of the Washington Post, who reminded the public (and, maybe, the Biden administration) that “Biden ran for office promising to restore democracy after 4 years of Trump. But today it was the British leader, NOT the American one, who spotlighted a key tenet of a flourishing democracy — respect for a free press — by taking questions from his press corps.”
During the press conference on Wednesday, Psaki implied the person responsible for the incident was, actually, Boris Johnson! “He [Johnson] called on individuals from his press corps without alerting us to that intention in advance,” Psaki said.
It is an open secret that the president’s mental capacity is rapidly declining, which makes him incapable of clear communication. This fact becomes more and more obvious. Even back in June of 2020, nearly 40 percent of voters thought then-presumptive Democratic nominee Biden had dementia, including 30 percent of independents likely to vote. One in five Democrats believed it as well.
This July, Trafalgar Group, known for its accurate predictions, said it found that almost 57 percent of American voters believed Joe Biden wasn’t fully executing the duties of president — and this was not just a GOP view. Nearly one in three Democrats thought someone else was running the country.
During the Senate hearings earlier this month, Senator James Risch (R-Idaho) asked the Secretary of State Antony Blinken to comment on one of the recent incidents when the president’s microphone was apparently muted when he was talking:
Somebody in the White House has the authority to press the button and stop the president, cut off the president’s speaking ability and sound. Who is that person?
Who, indeed?
