“These reporters are cherry-picking shreds of gossip at best… and making shit up at worst. Some have openly loathed Biden for years, & are salivating at the chance to torch his team,” former speechwriter to President Joe Biden Dan Cluchey wrote, laying out his own experience with the president that belies the post-debate beltway narrative.
Cluchey wrote:
For whatever it’s worth — probably nothing — I spent a decent amount of time in close proximity to Pres. Biden before leaving the White House in the fall of ‘22. That included dozens of trips, early AM and late night meetings, some pretty grueling days, etc. Never once… (1/7)
… did I see anything portending a performance as rough as last week’s. I saw a POTUS who was focused & sharp — w/ old-dude idiosyncrasies, sure, but definitively with it. No moments that concerned me. You don’t have to believe me, but if it helps: I swear my life on it. (2/7)
Granted, I don’t know him nearly as well as countless others, and I’m 20-odd months removed from the job. But my firsthand experience was more than enough to make me (a) extremely surprised by the debate and (b) assume it to be an aberration. (3/7)
What has stunned me the most (not the ferocity of the press pile-on as Trump’s obvious, express intent to destroy the country continues to go wildly underreported — I expected that) has been the group of reporters who have giddily and obsessively used this moment to… (4/7)
… slander White House staffers as “liars,” “gaslighters,” & more, as if the debate was proof of some nefarious scheme to hoodwink the nation for years, and not, you know, a very surprising, unusually bad night. These reporters are cherry-picking shreds of gossip at best… (5/7)
… and making shit up at worst. Some have openly loathed Biden for years, & are salivating at the chance to torch his team. It’s ugly and wrong — but more gravely, it’s a massive failure of journalism at a moment when America desperately needs them to act like grown-ups (6/7)
… rather than petty, gossipy vengeance-seekers. There are legitimate questions here that POTUS must address head-on. But we are doomed either way if our political press can’t demonstrate the clarity and capacity to do *their* job, too. (7/7)
This man’s first hand experience with President Biden is being dismissed because “a lot can happen in two years.” And while that is true, what is also true is we have a President who had a bad debate but who is right now running the country exceptionally well by constitutional experts’ standards and anyone who is following the transformative policy he is enacting. Furthermore, Biden has done numerous events, including this debate, in which he discusses his policies with nuance and an obvious grasp of what’s going on, whereas Donald Trump didn’t present voters with any policies other than to point fingers at Joe Biden, name call, insult, and lie while at times even taking credit for Biden’s policies. That’s the guy who “won.”
While journalists have a job to inform voters and report on a bad debate, it’s alarming that our media has decided that a lying thug won a debate over a tired president who had just completed two international trips and was trying to share his actual policy wins with the People.
Instead, we see the media working in a pack to ignore Trump’s threat to democracy and freedom and give the conservative-majority SCOTUS cover for their shocking undermining of our founding principles. It’s odd that they aren’t calling for Trump’s medical records and cognitive tests, and asking Republicans if Trump should step down now that he’s a convicted felon.
The old man running this country with all of his heart and mind who had one bad debate is the focus of most of the energy, while the old man who consistently forgets words and makes no sense at his rallies and just canceled an interview after a rally because they wouldn’t give him the questions in advance is given a free pass.
That Trump is also a felon, adjudicated rapist and con artist and is accused of inciting a deadly insurrection in an effort to keep power and is cooking up the most nefarious plan to remake the US into a far-Right conservative nation if he wins the election seems to be of little interest to our media.
Surely the media can report on BOTH presidential candidates with the same amount of scrutiny, while also conveying the fact that Donald Trump’s violence-inciting and criminal history is clearly a larger threat than Joe Biden’s bad debate and thus warrants more focus.
