We Watched ABC So You Didn’t Have to. Here’s Their Worst Inaugural Meltdowns

Curtis Houck
January 20th, 2025 10:06 PM

Text to Speech

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With their struggle sessions on Monday morning serving as an appetizer, ABC delivered the main course in the afternoon hours following President Trump’s second inauguration with meltdowns about the address as a “harsh” repudiation” of Joe Biden, a “hot mess of division” “filled with hammers,” and heard before an audience of supporters who “did not really reflect” America “when it comes to diversity.”

The Disney-owned network also expressed relief that they had survived a speech that was “almost hard to watch” in the “grievances” Trump hurled at Biden and that Biden, by leaving office, would no longer be “dogged” by concerns “about his mental fitness and his capacity.”

World News Tonight anchor David Muir had the first word edgewise, but it was ABC News Live anchor and debate co-moderator Linsey Davis who delivered this mouthfull of a Notable Quotable:

Chief Biden apple polisher Mary Bruce of course took issue with how Trump’s address “repudiate[d]” Biden, “blasting his administration as a failure but more than that, he really repudiated Joe Biden’s worldview, his values, you know, promising to — to unravel much that he has done to — on diversity, equity, and inclusion, declaring there will only be two genders, male and female.”

She continued to express concern that Trump was so critical of her beloved President after, in her telling, Biden was so gracious in the transition:

Three-time anti-Trump author Jonathan Karl lamented Trump’s “harsh condemnation of the outgoing President” and argued that, in Trump’s case, any positive mentions of America’s promise are actually attacks on the country’s character because it’s “a not so implicit condemnation of the age that is just ended.”

After Muir remarked the intimacy of the Capitol rotunda set-up created a “visual where you’re seeing the outgoing President and Vice President intimately listen to what the incoming President has to say,” presidential historian Mark Updegrove fretted this “was such a harsh repudiation of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s administration” he found it “almost hard to watch” as someone “whose first time was marked by division” returned.

Chief global affairs anchor Martha Raddatz also felt bad for Biden that he had to hear Trump’s “long list of grievances.”

As the Bidens flew way from the Capitol, Nightline co-host Byron Pitts invoked Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 with respect to Biden’s life and that “many” were “filled with hope” by Trump’s speech while others saw it as “filled with hammers” and “good day” for those who believe the country should be “colorblind” while not for the “color brave”:

Davis and Muir thereafter offered more kisses for Biden (click “expand”):

DAVIS: And now we have the shot again, and to your point, David, wondering and we may never know, the potential relief that he feels on this day. This is a guy who in recent years has had to be so careful of every step, literally and figuratively as people wondered if he’d trip up the steps, you know, going aboard Air Force One. This is somebody who’s been dogged now at least in the last year about his mental fitness and his capacity to be able to run this nation, and so you would imagine there’s a bittersweet sense, perhaps more bitter than sweet though for Joe Biden today.

MUIR: Yeah. Difficult to — to leave Washington knowing that he was not able to get the Democrats over the finish line for a second term, whether he could serve the entire four years of that term or not. He has said in recent days that he wished that he had communicated his achievements in a way that the American people would have received, and he took that — the blame for that, for not communicating that better. He — he does hand over to the incoming President, President Trump, an economy that is rebounding, you know, inflation has come down, though the American people still feel higher prices, and that is a very real thing. Stock market having a very good year, and it’ll be on Donald Trump now to keep that going.

Muir cowardly took the Biden regime’s line about the fateful June debate, insisting “he had a cold’ though “age catches up to you in — in what is a very stressful job in the White House.” 

Bruce would only concede “that inevitable march of time is something that none of us can beat despite Joe Biden and his campaign’s best effort” before shifting to Biden flying away and fretting he might “wonder if the Washington he devoted his life to, he feels like he no longer recognizes.”

Muir and Moran seethed over would become the “sweeping” scope of the January 6 pardons (click “expand”):

MUIR: This would be extraordinarily sweeping in nature.

MORAN: Sweeping and telling. Telling about this national moment. Think about it. Those two men in the capitol today side by side performing the constitutionally mandated and this time peaceful transfer of power and still fighting over the meaning of January 6 with their parties. President Biden pre-emptively pardoning the members of the committee and some of the witnesses before the committee that investigated the attack on the — on the Capitol. President Trump now pardoning, it looks like, pretty much everyone who attacked the Capitol. One of the things at issue in this election is what did January 6 mean to the United States, not just now but in the future. That question has not been resolved. To many in the country, most Republicans on the day, it was horrifying and disgusting and a crime against our democracy. They’ve changed their tune. A lot of Americans still feel that way. Other Americans say it’s a lot of hyped up partisan politics. How we resolve that dispute will tell us a lot about who we’re going to be.

MUIR: That’s true, Terry. And something we heard in traveling the country, Martha, I know you talked about this too in covering the election, people would acknowledge they didn’t like what they saw, but it wasn’t their number one issue. It wasn’t even near the top of the list. So, whether wiping it off the map is the answer to some of those voters or not, we’ll have to wait and see what the American people say and how they react to the news.

Leave it to Bruce and Muir to defend Biden’s brash rash of pardons, arguing he only made them as “a sort of remarkable tit for tat” with many being “over what the meaning of January 6 is.”

“Biden also made it clear in pardoning his family members in the 11th hour....not because of wrongdoing, is what he said, but he feared there would be retribution in the months to come,” Muir proclaimed and Bruce added Biden only did it to save them from a man he “didn’t trust...to use his power appropriately.”

Texas-based correspondent Mireya Villarreal weighed in just before 3:00 p.m. Eastern, touting Biden’s final months of “tighter restrictions” at the border (as though there was some set of order) and warning Trump’s focus on the border would bring “chaos.”

She was backed up by Muir and Bruce feigning outrage about the sticker price of mass deportations (click “expand”):

MUIR: Mary Bruce, sort of a where things stand at the end of the Biden administration as we begin the Trump administration. And again, we talked about this. These were tough questions even for Kamala Harris when she took the top of the ticket is why did the Biden administration wait so long? When they did take action, I mean, numbers are down significantly, are they not?

BRUCE: 60 percent. That’s how much the encounters at the border have decreased since last spring when Joe Biden put in those stricter asylum — tougher asylum restrictions. And while there — yes, at the time there were many questions about why, he didn’t do that sooner. Now there are questions for the new Trump administration, which is you know, the problem at the border may not be as dire as he been — painted given those numbers. I have to tell you, I spent time along the border shortly after those new restrictions were put in place. I spent time in Arizona and Mireya knows this well, speaking with Border Patrol agents, they said they noticed almost immediately a decrease in encounters they were seeing every day. And what they really wanted from Washington, they told me at the time, was for Congress to give them more resources, more access to technology, things that they needed to able to do their job, more patrol, more staffing, more man power along the border and it is interesting app Mireya was talking about, the fact that those appointments — the CBP1 app — that those appointments may have been cancelled, our team — their estimates — they predict that that means over 30,000 migrants may have been scheduled for appointments over the next three weeks. They now are in limbo.

(....)

MUIR: Of course, [Elon Musk’s] talking about cutting government waste, actually said leading up to the election that there could be some pain after the election. But given all that, there comes a cost of this to actually — to pull off some of what Donald Trump would really like to see when it comes to undocumented immigrants in this country is also in addition to all the legal challenges that Katherine talks about, extremely expensive when you’re also talking about cutting down government spending, trying to bring down the deficit, extending the tax cuts, you’re going to have to pay for immigration as well.

BRUCE: And it certainly is at odds with what Donald Trump is arguing he wants to do in terms of increasing government efficiency, getting rid of wasteful spending, trying to pull off the largest mass deportation in American history is extremely expensive and logistically really, really challenging. You have to identify all of these people, you have to go in to these cities. Now, we do know that Trump has said he wants to likely start in these liberal cities, in sanctuary cities like possibly Chicago as Jon Karl mentioned earlier. His border czar has admitted the goal here is shock and awe and I think it does get into the question about optics versus substance. How much are you trying to send a message by carrying out these kind of raids? They’ve said they would start out with immigrants with a criminal record, but wouldn’t stop there. They would possibly broaden beyond that, how do you do that?

Speaking of costs, chief business and economics correspondent Rebecca Jarvis doubled down from her comments before the inaugural ceremonies on cutting government sending, saying a reduction in the size of government would result in “the economy...grow[ing] slower over time.”

Raddatz had one more doozy. This time, she lost her noddle over the removal of Mark Milley’s portrait from the Pentagon as though it were some act of war:

To see the relevant ABC transcript from January 20, click here.

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