In the immediate aftermath of the press conference seen ‘round the world, NBC Washington Correspondent Mike Memoli provided us with a masterclass in cope, and an insight into how we all got gaslight into believing President Joe Biden is some sort of foreign policy expert.
Watch as Memoli laments that Biden’s foreign policy mastery was outshined by “Vice President Trump”- the “flubs”. (click “expand):
MSNBC- ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES
7/11/24
8:40 PM
CHRIS HAYES: I want to bring in now NBC News correspondent Mike Memoli, who is at the press conference when President Biden was in the room. Mike, your impression having been there.
MIKE MEMOLI: Yeah. Well, Chris, as somebody who has covered President Biden for 16 years, there's so much to unpack from this news conference, I thought. So interesting to hear about the prospects for a convention in which delegates could vote their conscience. He talked about being open, potentially, to a neurological exam if the doctors recommend that. He talked about being willing to pass the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris if his advisors can convince him that he can’t win and that she can.
I think for so many people watching this news conference, we can boil this down to two moments. The first was President Biden giving an extensive answer, detailed answer, an answer full of decades of experience on the world stage to the question about the future of China and what it means in our international order. This is somebody who I went to Beijing with in 2011 when he was vice president, had the first meetings of any world leader with Xi Jinping. If you want to know why President Biden wants to see this through, wants to finish the job, it’s because he thinks no one else can match that experience that he has in dealing with the most important foreign policy question of our time. It was a long answer, it was an extensive answer, it really was illustrative of how he is handling this important part of his job as Commander-in-Chief.
But for those Democrats who tuned in tonight nervous about his candidacy moving forward, all they are going to remember is within the opening minutes talking about “Vice President Trump”. This speaks to the incredibly high bar, the high stakes that the president and the scrutiny that he’s going to be facing every day going forward in this campaign. If this press conference had happened on June 27th, on June 26th, we would not giving it the level of coverage, we would not be dissecting every answer the way we are now. But so many Democrats are watching this and doing just that. And, the president when he was a candidate for vice president, when he was a senator would make the same kind of verbal flubs that you’ve heard tonight. When I was covering him in the 2008 campaign there was a blog dedicated to those verbal miscues. “Oh, that Joe”. People wrote them off, laughed them off. Now they are seen as existential tests for his continued candidacy, and the question many Democrats are facing is, can this continue for another 120 or so days?
See, it isn’t just the “verbal flubs” that are a problem with Biden but the cognitive decline that, until his collapse in the June 27th debate, was written off by the media and the left as “cheap fakes”, or conspiracy theories. The truth is that Biden ALWAYS was a gaffe machine and viewed as a blowhard, even when he was at the top of his game.
Now that the great game to dislodge him is underway, the Regime Media want to make Biden into this master statesman. But this is inconsistent with history. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates famously said that Biden’s been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”. Within the current administration one need only to look to the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal and the ongoing border crisis to prove Gates’ thesis right. This is the gaslight, Joe Biden’s foreign policy mastery, that we are being asked to believe today.
These are the elements of Memoli’s lament. If only we’d stop focusing on the gaffes. But those aren’t just gaffes, they are proof evident of major cognitive decline- which is how we got here in the first place.
