While Joe Biden’s June 27 presidential debate performance may go down in American history as one of the worst ever, the way he, his campaign and the White House apparatus have handled the fallout from it has been just as bad.
The official spin is that while it may not have been a great night for Biden, it was an hour and a half out of a 3½-year presidency which they say is what has shown the true strength of the leader of the free world.
While that is also highly debatable, one thing that isn’t is how, in trying to show that Biden is still fit as a fiddle despite his age, the debate instead highlighted the fact that he’s not.
Interviews Biden has done since then and public appearances he’s made also prove the point.
For instance, at a campaign event he did in Wisconsin on July 5, Biden was an incoherent mess after arriving an hour late. He talked about how he was going to “beat Donald Trump again in 2020” and seemingly forgot the names of some local Democratic officials while uttering sentences that trailed off into confusion at times.
A softball interview he did that same week with ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, also didn’t go well.
Biden’s incoherence once again shined through as he repeatedly insisted that the reason for his poor debate performance was because he was merely “exhausted” after traveling abroad and had been dealing with “a cold” — the latter of which was never conveyed to the public until after the debate was over.
“The whole way I prepared, nobody’s fault, mine,” he said. “Nobody’s fault but mine. I, uh — I prepared what I usually would do sittin’ down as I did come back with foreign leaders or National Security Council for explicit detail. And I realized ’bout partway through that, you know…”
If those sentences didn’t make sense to you, you’re not alone.
Making matters worse for Biden and his campaign were the revelations over the weekend that two post-debate radio interviews with him were conducted with questions submitted to the hosts from the campaign itself.
According to The New York Times, “Andrea Lawful-Sanders, the host of ‘The Source’ on WURD in Philadelphia, said Saturday morning on CNN that Biden officials had provided her with a list of eight questions ahead of the interview on Wednesday (July 3).”
Lawful-Sanders told CNN, “I got several questions — eight of them. And the four that were chosen were the ones that I approved.”
But even the presubmitted questions didn’t help Biden, as he said at one point during their exchange that he was “proud” to be “the first black woman to serve with a black president.”
The questions asked of Biden on “The Earl Ingram Show” out of Milwaukee were also submitted in advance, Ingram confirmed to ABC News.
Lawful-Sanders and WURD have since “mutually agreed to part ways,” according to the radio station, which added, “WURD Radio is not a mouthpiece for the Biden or any other admin.”
Though there are still some holdouts, national media outlets that have in effect acted as mouthpieces themselves for Biden and his administration throughout his presidency no longer are, at least on this issue, with some feigning shock at his debate performance and what has followed since.
Whatever the case may be, it’s safe to say that the wheels have fallen off the Biden Express, and as usual, he has no one to blame for all of this but himself.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
