By Joe Saunders
Former President Donald Trump built a political career out of forcing liberals to face reality — and a post-presidential interview on Wednesday showed he hasn’t changed.
In a telephone interview with Newsmax TV host Greg Kelly, Trump, who’s been largely out of the public eye since Inauguration Day, took on current President Joe Biden’s appearance during a CNN town hall Tuesday and Biden’s claim that there was no coronavirus vaccine when he took office.
His description was dead-on, and it won’t make liberals happy at all.
“I saw that he said there was no vaccine when he came into office, and yet he got a shot before he came into office,” Trump told the host of “Greg Kelly Reports,” a program that’s rapidly growing in popularity with Trump’s political base.
“It was already in early November that we announced it, but we actually had it substantially before that. We were giving millions of shots and millions of doses.
“So he’s either not telling a truth, or he’s mentally gone. One or the other.”
Those should not be palatable options when it comes to the president of the United States.
But they’re alternatives Americans are likely going to have to get used to thanks to the installation of the aging, often-confused Biden to the highest office in the land.
Check out his statement from Tuesday night.
That was far from the only questionable moment. No one who watched even video segments of Biden’s CNN appearance could have been inspired to confidence by the wandering answers.
Besides the flatly wrong statement about the coronavirus, Biden made excuses for Chinese government practices that his own secretary of state agrees are “genocide,” and claimed that the liberal boogeyman of “white supremacy” is an actual threat to the United States. (It barely exists to the degree liberals obsess over, much less posing a threat to the Republic. The heyday of the Democratic Ku Klux Klan is long over.)
As disgraceful as Biden’s appearance was, it was protected, naturally by his Praetorian Guard in the establishment media. In the case of the vaccine howler, for instance, the establishment “fact-checkers” hastened to assure Americans that what the president said wasn’t really what he meant. (Does anyone remember any major media outlet trying to interpret Trump’s words like that?)
That might work for liberal activists posing as journalists, but for normal Americans, the options Trump presented are a little easier to believe.
Biden, after all, has a well-established reputation for appearing confused and detached in public — and it goes well beyond the kind of occasional verbal slip-up the establishment media is trying to pass off here.
He is also well known, and deservedly so, for not being shy about skewing the truth.
He has lied repeatedly, and publicly about incidents that are matters of public knowledge — and almost always to make himself look good. (Being present for a field-of-combat awards ceremony that didn’t happen, for instance, or getting “arrested” in South Africa in the 1970s while trying to visit then-imprisoned anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela.)
For Biden to claim there was no vaccine when he took office would be just another way to try to discredit the Trump presidency, and claim undeserved credit for his own administration.
So both Biden’s history and common sense back up Trump in his take on Biden’s CNN appearance Tuesday night: Biden’s mind is going or he was lying.
UPDATE, Feb. 18, 2021: Following the publication of this article, the fact-checking outlet PolitiFact posted an article titled “In Context: What Joe Biden said about the vaccine supply he found when he took office.” After citing examples of Biden critics lambasting the president’s claim that “we didn’t have [the vaccine] when we came into office,” PolitiFact argued that “These are examples of Biden’s political opponents taking words out of context.”
“You can judge his meaning for yourself, but it’s clear to us that Biden didn’t mean there were no vaccines available before he took office,” PolitiFact said. This seems to be a questionable claim, however. Biden did indeed say “we didn’t have” the vaccine when he took office. His words were clear, despite PolitiFact’s apparent attempt to argue that the words he said actually meant something else. This does not mean that this was anything more than a gaffe, only that a reasonable person would, after hearing this statement from the president, assume he was asserting vaccines were not available on Jan. 20, 2021.
In fact, even Glenn Kessler, the editor and chief “fact-checker” at the liberal-leaning Washington Post, acknowledged on Twitter that Biden’s remark “was a verbal stumble, a typical Biden gaffe.”
That being said, PolitiFact is correct in noting the additional context to Biden’s remarks, which The Western Journal is including in this update.
“We have — we came into office, there was only 50 million doses that were available. We have now — by the end of July, we’ll have over 600 million doses — enough to vaccinate every single American,” Biden said, according to a White House transcript of his remarks.
“Here, look, we — what we did — we got into office and found out the supply — there was no backlog. I mean, there was nothing in the refrigerator, figuratively and literally speaking, and there were 10 million doses a day that were available,” the president also said.
Both those statements came before Biden’s assertion that “we didn’t have [the vaccine] when we came into office,” thus suggesting that the president was at least somewhat aware that a vaccine had, in fact, been developed and authorized before he took office. However, the gaffe-prone Biden made the now-infamous claim anyway.
While it is important to recognize Biden’s remarks in their full context, it is inaccurate to argue, as PolitiFact did, that Biden’s words did not mean what they sounded like they meant.
Author: Joe Saunders
Source: Western Journal: Trump Goes After Biden: 'Either Not Telling the Truth or Mentally Gone'