In his first press conference since assuming the nation’s highest office, President Joe Biden did little to assuage the concerns of many on the right or left side of the aisle.
A President with cognitive decline is a national security risk.
It’s time to stop dancing around that.#BidenPressConference
— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) March 25, 2021
All eyes were on whether the president could pull off the solo act after more than two months of de facto sequestration within the White House.
Considerable speculation has arisen as to whether Biden is, in fact, at the helm of his administration, often fueled by the president himself in his frequent references to “President Harris.”
His performance on Thursday certainly will raise more questions than it answered.
Biden wavered between detailed, scripted responses to questions nobody had asked; incoherent, rambling nonsequitors; and patently false or contradictory statements about his policies.
Biden’s brain sputters out as he tries talking about the filibuster pic.twitter.com/qYmB2daNdk
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 25, 2021
At times, he appeared to grow cantankerous, raising his voice to shouting levels; and he seemed impatient at others, checking his watch and attempting to walk offstage mid-question at the hourlong event.
While he sought to bash former president Donald Trump for many of his own administration’s recent failures, he also hinted vaguely at the possibility of returning to Trump’s hard-line diplomacy in dealing with China, Mexico, North Korea and Afghanistan.
Biden even expressed a sort of wistfulness for the days of the prior administration. “My predecessor—oh God, I miss him,” he said at one point.
While laboring under the delusion that his administration was winning the approval of a majority of Republican voters—contrary to any objective polling on the matter—he expressed an alarming openness toward several politically dangerous measures being pushed by the radical left, such as eliminating the filibuster and nationalizing election administration in ways that would be largely conducive to vote fraud.
Biden seemed untethered from the reality of what the policies were that he was supporting. He implied that the controversial HR1 bill passed by the House would protect against states that sought to deprive water for those waiting in line to vote, cut off Election Day voting at 5 p.m. and eliminate absentee voting altogether except “under the most rigid of circumstances.”
By and large, Republican legislatures are currently trying to reinforce common-sense, existing election procedures to safeguard against vote fraud, while Democrats in Congress are attempting to codify illegal measures taken by several states last year under the auspices of a pandemic “emergency.”
“I am convinced that we’ll be able to stop this because it is the most pernicious thing,” Biden said, although it was unclear what he sought to stop.
“This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” he said.
I feel bad for random guys named “Jim Eagle” who were accidentally roped into that odd Biden line. (I think he was trying to make a “crow = bad, eagle = good” thing land and instead made no sense)
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) March 25, 2021
But in other areas that were assumed to be at the top of his priority list, Biden signaled that he was in no rush to take immediate action.
“It’s a matter of timing,” he said, while appearing to signal that gun control was not a top priority of the administration.
“As you’ve all observed, successful presidents—better than me—have been successful in large part because they know how to time what they’ll be doing,” he added.
At several points when he veered off script, it was difficult to determine whether Biden was intentionally avoiding a direct answer or was genuinely lost.
In response to the question from Bloomberg’s Justin Sink about gun control, he instead rambled for several minutes about infrastructure.
He suggested that he would rebuild the nation’s roadways three feet higher to adjust for the inevitable flooding due to climate change, and that he would employ jobless miners and oil workers capping methane wells.
Biden said he formally plans to announce his infrastructure overhaul on Friday in Pittsburgh.
Many of the questions appeared to have been pre-arranged from a list of friendly left-wing journalists.
Notorious “woke” reporter Yamiche Alcindor thew softballs about whether immigrants were coming because Biden was “a moral decent man” and whether he would support ending the filibuster because of contrarian Republicans in the evenly divided Senate refusing to play ball with his radical agenda.
Biden seemed cautious to try to avoid pitfalls of acknowledging that there was, indeed, a “crisis” at the border, which his administration has formally denied in previous statements.
“I guess I should be flattered people are coming because I’m a nice guy,” he replied to the loaded, falsely framed query.
“… But the truth of the matter is, nothing has changed,” he continued. “It happens every single solitary year. There is a significant increase of people coming to the border in the winter months.”
There is no hard evidence to support that claim, with most immigration experts believing that the warmer seasons are a large driver of immigration.
Defending the overcrowding of children in cage-like detention facilities, Biden dispelled the frequent left-wing talking point that suggested many were young children, noting that most were older teenage boys.
“I realize it’s much more heart-wrenching—and it is—to deal with a 6 or 7 year old,” he said.
But “the idea that we have tens of thousands of kids in these god-awful facilities that are little babies” was inaccurate, he said.
However, he conceded that there were some unaccompanied infants “crying all night” in his detention centers.
Two reporters—ABC News’s Cecelia Vega and Univision’s Janet Rodriguez—called him out on his claim that the problem was already being addressed in earnest by US Customs and Border Patrol—an agency for which Biden has yet to formally name a commissioner.
The journalists said that they had personally been to the border, interviewed young children and attempted to reach their parents using the information recorded on wrist-bands that they arrived with.
Biden acknowledged that many of those wrist-bands could be traced back to coyotes.
In a moment that bore strong echoes to Trump’s defense of detention centers, he said the process of trying to safely reunite children and parents was time consuming since they were obliged to use techniques like DNA tests and birth certificates for confirmation.
“There has to be some certitude that this is actually mom, dad, or whatever,” he said. “And there’s ways to do that: ‘What was your dog’s name?'”
Biden also indicated that children whose parents could be traced might increase their chances of being deported, including a 9-year-old Honduran boy who had made the trek by foot with only one young companion.
“The judgment has to be made whether or not … there’s an overwhelming reason why he’d be put in a plane and sent back to his mom,” Biden said.
