Krystal & Saagar REACT: Biden Calls TRUMP VP In CONFUSED Presser
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Hello, everybody. Good evening. We just watched President Biden's big boy press conference, as his own staffers called it, clocked in around 59 minutes. Crystal, he took about seven questions from the White House press corps. One of them doesn't count because, as I predicted, he fed one to a foreign reporter who asked perhaps one of the dumbest questions at a high stakes press conference that we have seen. And yet a couple of interesting moments emerged. The first one was when he was

The first and probably most noteworthy, ironically, before the press conference even began.

Yeah, so this was a bit of an unmitigated disaster for President Biden. Before the presser, he had the not very challenging job of introducing President Zelensky of Ukraine and accidentally calls him President Putin before reversing course. Let me go ahead and share my screen because we have this very uncomfortable moment that I can show to you. Here we go. Take a listen.

And now I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination. Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin. President Putin. He's going to beat President Putin. President Zelensky. I'm so focused on beating Putin, we've got to worry about it. Anyway, Mr. President. I'm better. You are a hell of a lot better.

And, Sagar, I don't know if you watched any of the zoom ins of the world leaders that were there, but their faces, not sure what to do. There was a reporter in the room who said people started calling out Zelensky's name to help Biden catch the mistake. Now, the liberal cope on this, of course. Oh, well, he fixed it right away. But listen, as we've said before, if this happens,

quote unquote gaffe had just fallen out of the coconut tree and didn't exist in the context of all of the other decline that we have seen manifested just over the past few weeks, let alone the past number of months. That would be one thing, but he consistently mixes up names consistently.

Cannot complete his thoughts. Seems lost. Seems out of it. And this just fits very clearly into this pattern. Not to mention, you know, for liberals, Putin is the ultimate baddie. So for him to call the ultimate hero by the ultimate baddie's name, that's a tough one. It would be one thing if it just happened once. Let's say once a quarter. It's a whole other coming 14 days off of that press conference. And it's a whole other whenever he did it exactly three hours later in the very first

answer to the very first question, confusing the vice president, Kamala Harris, calling her vice president Trump crystal. And I believe that we have that clip as well, which was, I mean, I honestly gasped the same way that I think that we both did during we beat Medicare. I could not believe. Oh, sorry.

I cut you off. Go ahead. Play it again. Here it is. And this is, as you said, this was in response to the very first question. He gets all jumbled up and calls his own vice president. He was asked if she was fit to take over, basically asking, all right, well, if you picked her, why can't she serve in your stead? And in the course of answering that, you'll hear him call her Vice President Trump. I wouldn't have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president.

that I think she's not qualified to be president. So let's start there. Number one, I wouldn't have picked Vice President Trump. So there you go. And by the way, didn't correct it. Didn't notice, didn't correct it. At the very end, a reporter from NBC News, at the end when he's walking out and everybody's shouting at him, whatever, the one person who was able to get through says to him,

You said in the very first answer, Vice President Trump. Trump himself is now using that to say you're too old, you're unfit, etc. What's your response? And Biden said something confusing. Just listen to him or something like that. What? I mean, look, we don't want to cherry pick too much. It was a 59 minute press conference. I stand corrected, by the way. It was 11 questions, not seven. A couple of them were follow ups. That's why it was a little bit.

confused on the overall number. But in the 59 minutes, two of the reporters asked foreign policy questions. And I mean, look, I don't want to go too far in extending this man credit. When I say command of the facts, he seemed generally aware of what the hell was going on, which is definitely different than prior.

Now, a lot of what he did say when his brain was firing was bragging about his Israel and Ukraine policy, which is crazy. I mean, at one point, he seemed to imply that the 2024 election should be a referendum on NATO and on Ukraine. And by the way, I will take that deal every single day of the week if he wants to continue down that road. The thing is, and this is where I'm curious, and we were talking a little bit before, is

Overall, he has delivered enough tonight for his most partisans who had departed a little bit away from him to feel very comfortable. So let me give examples. People like Jennifer Rubin over at The Washington Post, one of his chief propagandists. Kate Bedingfield, we'll remember her. She's a former communications director who has not been very bullish on President Biden the last couple of years.

two weeks or at the very least being like, hey, it's a legitimate question. She says tonight she's tweeting out saying that, you know, President Biden did a good job, like reassured the American people. I see enough people out there, mostly liberals, you know, who were uncomfortable, but saying he did OK. And I got to say, I think he did OK enough to

to stop the worst case scenario from falling out. And just because he also displayed his sheer arrogance, Crystal, what really struck out to me was that question where he was asked what it would take for him to drop out of the race. And he said that he...

he was the judge of his own fitness and of whether he was doing a good job. He's like, as long as I believe I am still doing a good job, I'm going to stay in. So his egotism, the same that we saw in George Stephanopoulos, where he said only God Almighty can force me to drop out, was very much on display tonight, too. So here's what I would say. This is about what I would have expected Joe Biden's performance to be at the debate.

I totally agree with that. This is what I thought it would be. Yes. It was rambling. It was at times incoherent. The foreign policy answers were long-winded. I know people, liberals, were spinning that as like a great command of the facts. But it was just him sort of like verbal diarying everything that he knows about an issue and not really being responsive to the question at hand.

There was lots of coughing. There was lots of starting a sentence and then cutting himself off because he forgot the train of thought and going, well, anyway, there was him mixing up, you know, Vice President Harris, his own vice president with Trump. That's crazy. So that is on par with what I expected his debate performance to be. And if that had been his debate performance, we would not be having this conversation right now. So it was not at the level of total chaos.

catastrophe that the debate performance was. However, we live in a different world now than we did prior to the debate. And my sense is that a lot, and there's reporting to this effect too from, I don't remember if it was CBS or ABC that had the report that literally, sorry, the dog keeps knocking the table. Literally dozens of Democrats have

are prepared to open the floodgates and come out in a coordinated way and call for his resignation. And this was not dependent on what happened in this press conference. They've already made their minds up. And so now, rather than looking for...

Something to be reassuring. It's not enough for it to have met a very, very low bar of it wasn't as much of a catastrophe as the debate. I don't know that there was a perfect performance even that he could have turned in tonight that would have turned the tides for him because I think some of this is already set. But the other thing I would say is if you're in that camp where, think of this, Sagar, you've drafted your statement.

You've coordinated with dozens of other House Democrats, perhaps some Senate Democrats as well. You're locked and loaded. Do you look at that press conference and go, gee, I was totally wrong? No. No. Yeah.

No, you don't. You go, yeah, this isn't great. This isn't great. And this is him like at his very best. So that's why I think in a lot of ways, you know, the press conference was built up as like, this is it. This is do or die. We even said that in our own show today. But as I came to think about it more and as the reporting came out,

I think in a sense the die is probably already cast. And Nancy Pelosi is the one who said, you know, let's wait for the NATO leaders to go. Let's wait for them to get out of town and then do what needs to be done. I think they took that as, you know, a real signal that once this thing was over, okay, it's game on. And already you've had enough come out. You've had enough move in that direction that that seems to me that, you know, we're still headed forward.

headed that way? I'm in two minds. I just don't know. I mean, on the one hand, I could see it staving off the landslide, which is what I think it really would take to force him out of the race at this point. But to your point, I want to read here from a congressman, Jim Hines, Democratic congressman, put out a statement immediately after Biden's press conference saying,

Joe Biden's record of public service is unrivaled. His accomplishments are immense. His legacy as great president is secure. He must not risk that legacy, those accomplishments, and an American democracy to soldier on in the face of horrors promised by Donald Trump.

Trump. And so he is saying, I hope that President Biden will step away from the presidential campaign. I also saw an insightful report, ABC News' congressional reporter saying this, my takeaway from conversations with skeptical congressional Democrats tonight, Biden has proved to them, quote, he can be president, but not

not necessarily that he can win two separate things. And I think now again, you know, for, for, I think for us, at least for me, the can be president is still out of the question, but I could see in there, you know, in their warped worldview, they're like, yeah, you know, he can handle the facts.

of right now, but not necessarily that he could win. And I also think there's a bad case of Washington brain here where people will say, oh, look how amazingly he was able to talk about Golda Meir and Israel and his foreign policy accomplishments when, as you and I know, because I think we're more connected with voters, just through our show, we can see what resonates with people and what doesn't. Everyone's going to be talking about those first two clips that we played at the beginning.

A lot of that NATO stuff that no one's going to care.

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I don't think he knew how big it would be, how big the life I was given and live is.

I think he was like, oh, yeah, things come and go. But with me, it never came and went. Is she Donna Martin or a down-and-out divorcee? Is she living in Beverly Hills or a trailer park? In a town where the lines are blurred, Tori is finally going to clear the air in the podcast, Misspelling.

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Sorry, like on the heels of that debate, Vice President Trump, that is going to be everywhere, everywhere. Trump should start selling, you know, merchandise with that on it. So in the same way that in the Stephanopoulos interview, as time wore on, the most problematic part for Biden ended up being really his sort of poll denialism and sense of just complete and utter disconnect from what a dire political situation this is.

There were two moments here that I think are the two that sort of linger for Democrats. One is he gets asked, what about your limitations? Right.

you're trying to serve for another four years and you're already talking about how there are limitations. And he tries to say, I don't know what limitations, there are no limitations. And then he goes on to discuss the limitations he has. So I have a little bit of that one I can pull up. The other one is very much in line with this poll denialism. He says, if you could show me polls that show that Kamala could win and that I have zero chance,

of winning, then I'll get out. But there are no polls that say that. Now, we both know that's preposterous. And so I think if you're a Democratic leader looking at this, you're still seeing that level rise.

of utter and complete denial that there's even a problem here. And I think that's an issue for him. So let me go ahead and pull up this first one, which is him responding to questions about his bedtime, which listen, frankly, right now, 8.50 p.m. I relate to him a little bit on this one right here, but I'm also not trying to be president of the United States and I'm not 80 freaking years old with potentially undiagnosed Parkinson's. Let's go ahead and take a listen to what he had to say.

Thank you, Mr. President. Presidency is the most straining job in the world, and it's 24-7. How can you say you'll be up for that next year, in two years, in four years, given the limits you've acknowledged that you have today? The limits I've acknowledged I have? There's been reporting that you've acknowledged that you need to go to bed earlier and you're evening around 8. That's not true. Look, what I said was, instead of my every day starting at 7 and going to bed at midnight,

it'd be smarter for me to pace myself a little more. And I said, for example, the eight, seven, six stuff, instead of starting a fundraiser at nine o'clock, start at eight o'clock. People get to go home by 10 o'clock. That's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about. And if you looked at my schedule since I made that stupid mistake in the campaign, in the debate, I mean, my schedule has been full bore.

I've done, where's Trump been? Riding around in his golf cart, filling out his scorecard before he hits the ball. I mean, look, he's done virtually nothing. And I have, I don't know how many, I don't hold me to roughly 20 major events, someone with thousands of people showing up. And so I just think it's better. I always have an inclination, whether I was playing sports or doing politics,

Just to keep going, not stop. I just got to just pace myself a little bit. Pace myself a little bit more. He also made this comment about like, I love my staff, but they just keep adding things. And my wife is mad at me. My wife is mad at me. And you're like, wait, what? What was that? Yeah. And also maybe your staff keeps adding things because you're president of the United States. You have a lot of responsibilities. I don't know, just spitballing. But so he acknowledged...

It's funny because, like I said, he gets asked about the bedtime. He's like, no, no, no, that's not real. And then he's like, but it is kind of real. I am moving things up. I'm making it so it's later. I'm trying to quote unquote pace myself, which again is...

You are talking about serving for another five years. So how can we have any confidence that you can do the job today, let alone the job five years from now? It feels preposterous when even you are acknowledging that you're having to rein in your staff from scheduling events. There was also a diagram you probably saw as well. There's a lot of reporting about just how much downtime his staff schedules. So in a five-day foreign trip, two of those days are going to be rest days for him.

That's already where he's at today, let alone four years from now. Yeah, that's fine when I'm flying economy class, not whenever you fly in an airplane with a freaking bed, dude, and you get to stay in the world's most luxurious hotels.

And that's the problem here is that we're watching somebody. I mean, first of all, do you ever want to be president and say that you have any limitations on the way that you do your job? If the answer is yes, you shouldn't be in the job period. In my opinion, uh, that's first of all, but second is just the poll denialism that we have to come back to really is crazy because he also made another comment, uh,

do you remember this where he says, guys, the campaign hasn't even started yet. And it's like, dude, you're the one who agreed to a presidential debate in, in July. Nobody asked you to do that in June. No one ever asked you to do that. We all said, yeah, it's the earliest modern presidential debate. And, and,

you know, it's kind of interesting. There's a lot of different reasons why both had agreed to that. But you can't say that. That reason why, if anything, by the way, I think he officially really began the 2024, you know, general election season by agreeing to do that debate and becoming the biggest story in the entire world. Yeah. I mean, this is my other thing. I can't let the press corps off the hook too much here. There were no follow up questions. Obviously,

Obviously, some of these were prescreened by the White House. He avoided Peter Alexander of NBC News, who shouted that question there at the end. He avoided Peter Doocy at Fox News. A strong and confident president takes questions in a moment like that from the so-called opposition, and he's going to go for much longer. I said this morning on the show, President Eisenhower used to go two hours. I'm not going to sit here and give a man credit for going 59 minutes. I'm just not. This is basic shit for being president. Like...

and yeah listen it's ridiculous that we cover this in this way just the fact of this situation tells you everything you need to know yeah right the president giving some run-of-the-mill press conference after a nato conference should be like no one should even really care you know i mean we should care about the policy but it should be like oh my god can he possibly talk for 50 minutes

and not call his vice president the wrong name and not introduce Zelensky as Putin. Like, is this even possible? The answer obviously is apparently no. So the fact that it's even being parsed and analyzed to this degree tells you a lot.

But, you know, there was it really was in certain respects a very Trumpian performance in terms of the content. Yes. So the poll denialism. Right. Trump famously, you know, if Cat Turd takes a poll on Twitter that he likes, he's going to cite that as proof that he's the greatest president of all time or whatever. He's always up in the polls. He never loses, et cetera, et cetera. Biden has taken that on. That's where he is. And I think he truly believes it in a similar way that I think Trump probably really believes it as well.

But there also, he gets asked a question about, okay, you said last time you were going to be a bridge to the future. What changed?

And his answer was basically, well, I realize that I am the only one who can do it. Like with my experience in the Senate, he didn't exactly say I alone can do it, but that was the vibe. My experience in the Senate and with the world in such chaos, I just, I have to stay. I have to finish the job. This sense that he is the only one alone who can beat Trump, the only one alone who could pass the...

infrastructure act or whatever it is that we don't even know what he's planning on doing the second term because he never really talks about it but um that trumpian aspect of him and his ego really comes through but um let me go ahead and pull up this uh poll denialism moment that we have because as i said you know for democrats who are already locked and loaded with statements

saying we want you to resign, this is exactly the sort of thing that they hate to hear. You earlier explained confidence in your vice president. Yes. If your team came back and showed you data that she would fare better against former President Donald Trump, would you reconsider your decision to stay in the race? No, unless they came back and said, there's no way you can win. Me, no one's saying that. No poll says that.

Of course. Love it.

Lots of polls say that. Meanwhile, we do a segment on our show today about how New York is in play. Many people are, in fact, saying that. You will enjoy this, Crystal. So Steve Cohn of the Democratic congressman from Tennessee was just asked on CNN about his colleague, Jim Hines, calling for Biden to drop out. And he says, well, Jim Hines from Connecticut, it's a lot more white, a lot more liberal and a lot more elitist.

So now we're now a white guy from Memphis is playing the race card.

A white congressman from Memphis is playing the race card against a white congressman. We also have, and this is probably the most... I listened to Bakari Sellers do the same thing on CNN beforehand, and it is the most disingenuous, shameful, and I also, oh, and Van Jones saying the same thing on CNN. You know, I don't know why I watch these people at all, but I like to get a sense of what the mainstream is saying about it. It just makes me sick when these people appoint themselves representatives of an entire...

and pretends to speak for them. You don't speak for them. Right. You don't speak for them in any more than I speak for all white women, right? Well, the white women of the country feel that it's time we have a women president. How about that, Van Jones, Bakari Sellers, and Steve Cohen, and whoever else? Good point. But the notion that pushing Biden out of the race to get the first black female president is like racist.

OK, all right. Like, what are we doing here? And also the idea that he has this just monolithic black support is insane. This president is on track to get the lowest percent of the black vote of any Democratic president since I don't know when. So your conception of this

black monolith that is so pro-Biden that you can't possibly touch him is just completely invented. And I know that they know this, right? I know that they know that this is fake and completely invented by them for wholly disingenuous reasons. One last thing. Do we want to play? I haven't watched the full thing, but I am seeing on my feed, it was sent to me, Rachel Maddow apparently saying, I'm worried Biden is being given information about his political standing that may not be based in reality.

That seems interesting. You think? Well, you know what? And I saw to that point, I saw David Axelrod because he also picked up on the poll denialism that I think continues to be a real problem for Democrats. At least people don't care about

or even really beating Trump. They care about their own asses on the line this fall. And so if they feel like, oh my God, he doesn't even acknowledge he's down in the polls. He doesn't even know he's down at the polls. David Altserad tweeted, if what he being Biden said at the end of the presser is true, it sounds like Biden's team has not been very candid with him about what the data is showing. The age issue is a huge and potentially insurmountable concern and his odds of victory are very, very slim. This is also very Trumpian, the like,

Oh, the AIDS. It's the AIDS fault, right? Anything that Biden does wrong, it's not him. It's not his fault. It's the fault of the AIDS around him. Now, these AIDS deserve a lot of blame. Don't get me wrong. I think they are villains of history. I think they've lied to the American people. I think they've lied to their own staff. I think they've lied to their own party. The more and more reporting comes out about the way every single aspect of Biden and what he does is stage managed down to the word so that he can't possibly be caught in an unscripted moment.

and show their hands even to close in aides and allies of how adult he is at this point. But please, this man bears some real responsibility. This politician of 50 years, he can't read an independent poll for himself. Give me a break. Give me a break. Thank you. I agree. That's the other thing. Oh, they need to be more candid or even with Maddow. That's also Trumpian in terms of infantilizing him. He's a grown ass, not grown ass. He's near death.

Like he's on the other side of the bell curve here in terms of the age distribution. He spent the vast majority of his life as a professional politician. He knows he can read the New York Times if he wants to. He can read every liberal news outlet in the country and every single one of them has a poll saying you're going down. So, yeah, but I think he I think

I think he has convinced himself that those polls are all fake. I agree that anything that shows him and negative light is just not true. It's the fake news. It's the biased media, whatever. I mean, I, it is very Trumpy and he's constructing his own reality and he himself is drinking the Kool-Aid quite literally. He has constructed his own reality distortion field. So, um,

Yeah. Thank you for joining us, everybody, tonight. It was certainly something, you know, for American history. He's not going anywhere, at least for today. That's all we can say right now. That's about as far as it goes. Confidently, we can call it, you know, for today. It's 9.05 p.m. here on the East Coast. So there we go. He's headed to bed, as am I, by the way. Me too, yeah, by the way.

I do want to just... The last thing I'll say is, you know, the next thing to watch is... Number one, was that report even true about the dozens of Democrats? Because the media gets things wrong. Lord knows. But...

Now, what happens Friday, right? Do you see, is Jim Himes the only one who comes out? Or do you see a significant movement against him? You've got reporting Pelosi's moving behind the scenes. We talked about Obama moving behind the scenes during the day. So there's a lot at work.

and in my opinion I don't think this performance will forestall anything that was already planned and it appears that there were things that were already planned so that's what we'll be watching for and I'll be around maybe some tomorrow I don't know I gotta take the kids to Kings and Minions whatever but don't tell people where you're going big mistake we'll edit that out but anyway we'll be checking in and if anything major breaks we'll make sure to bring it to you guys we'll be around alright see you guys

Hi, I'm Katie Lowes. And I'm Guillermo Diaz. And we're the hosts of Unpacking the Toolbox, the Scandal Rewatch podcast where we're talking about all the best moments of the show. Mesmerizing. But also, we get to hang out with all of our old Scandal friends like Bellamy Young, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Debbie Allen, Kerry Washington. Well, suit up, gladiators. Grab your big old glass of wine and prepare yourselves for an even more behind-the-scenes Scandal.

I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years.

Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Angie Martinez, and on my podcast, I like to talk to everyone from Hall of Fame athletes to iconic musicians about getting real on some of the complications and challenges of real life.

I had the best dad and I had the best memories and the greatest experience. And that's all I want for my kids as long as they can have that. Listen to Angie Martinez IRL on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.