What happens to Joe Biden if he loses even Democratic stalwarts like Chuck Todd? The liberal Meet the Press host will assuredly switch back to propping up the President. But, for Tuesday at least, he said the quiet part loud and admitted that Biden has lost his so-called “competency” card.
Covering the continuingly unraveling situation in Afghanistan, host Hallie Jackson wondered what the Afghans needed to hear. Todd proceeded to ramble a bit about how this all went so wrong. But his conclusion is that Biden might not be seen as competent any longer: “I do think the biggest political fallout is competency. Joe Biden's greatest strength against Donald Trump in the campaign was the idea that he had been around the block.”
Todd lamented, “He knows what he's doing. We're facing this crisis with Covid, we need competency back in government, no more chaos. He's lost the competency high marks that he were getting at one time.”
In an ominous warning, the NBC/MSNBC host noted, “That's tough to get back.” Todd has been going back and forth between blaming Biden and spinning for him. On Sunday, he touted administration talking points that pointed the culpability at Donald Trump, saying, “there’s a lot of truth in there.”
The journalist worried, “Look, I happen to think that Biden can serve eight years and in year nine something happens and we’re going to be re-litigating this decision nine years later. It’s something that’s just going to haunt his legacy.”
Yet by Monday, after Biden’s blame-everyone-else speech, even Todd realized there “was the big gap in his remarks was not explaining why this is happening, why this is so chaotic.”
Either way, Todd's current state of mind is confusion as to how the President got this all so wrong. He concluded on Tuesday:
The big long-term question, why were we so unprepared for this moment? You can't help but come to two sort of conflicting theories but I don't know if we're ever going to get an answer that is going to feel satisfying. And goes to some combination of the President had his mind made up before he took the oath of office which direction he was going.
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A partial transcript is below. Click “expand” to read more.
Hallie Jackson Reports
8/17/2021
10:02
HALLIE JACKSON: Chuck, what do Afghans need to hear from the administration broadly this morning?
CHUCK TODD: Well, I think from the point of view of Afghans, is there going to be, how long is this process of evacuating Afghans going to last? How open will we be to bringing out more Afghans who want out? Where are we going to take them? How is that process worked? Are we cutting red tape, all of those things. That is the immediate and near term questions that have to be answered. The big long-term question, why were we so unprepared for this moment?
You can't help but come to two sort of conflicting theories but I don't know if we're ever going to get an answer that is going to feel satisfying. And goes to some combination of the President had his mind made up before he took the oath of office which direction he was going and the Pentagon never thought, I think they always thought they could buy more time. And for whatever reason didn't plan for every contingency. It was interesting yes how he tried to walk that line. He wants to accept the consequences of this decision, pass some blame but at the same time he didn't throw his own Pentagon under the bus.
He didn't throw the Intel agencies under the bus. But you got to ask, how, the orderly part of this, what went wrong? I’ll tell you, I do think the biggest political fallout is competency. Joe Biden's greatest strength against Donald Trump in the campaign was the idea that he had been around the block. He knows what he's doing. We're facing this crisis with Covid, we need competency back in government, no more chaos. He's lost the competency high marks that he were getting at one time. That's tough to get back.
