CNN’s Jake Tapper and Chris Wallace Gush About ‘Feisty’ Biden SOTU Speech, Jousts With Hecklers: ‘That Was The Magic Moment!’

CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Chris Wallace gushed over President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, calling it “feisty” and singling out the “magic moment” Biden took on heckling Republicans.

Biden delivered his first State of the Union address under the new GOP House majority Tuesday night, and a raucous majority it turned out to be. At one point during the speech, Biden invoked plans from several Republicans that would cause programs like Social Security to sunset every few years, and found himself flat-out arguing with Republicans screaming “LIAR!” in the middle of the speech.

Seconds after the speech ended, Tapper and his coverage team gushed about Biden’s performance.

“He was feisty, he was combative at times even responsive to the crowd,” Tapper said of the president, and noted Biden “was heckled quite often and quite rudely by many of the same House Republicans who made the speaker’s life so difficult a month ago when we were sitting there.”

The entire panel agreed that Biden’s handling of the hecklers was key, and Wallace even called it “the magic moment” of the speech:

ABBY PHILLIP: Biden in that moment, I think showed one of the things the White House was hoping he would show, which is some vigor and some fight.

JAKE TAPPER: That’s a good point.

ABBY PHILLIP: And yeah, and I think that at the end of the day, that might be the thing that you remember what he ad-libbed in all those moments.

CHRIS WALLACE: I don’t think I don’t think there’s any doubt that that was the magic moment, and the speech went on what, an hour and…

JAKE TAPPER: An hour and 12 minutes.

CHRIS WALLACE: And what everybody’s going to remember what all the clips are going to be tomorrow morning on the news are of that moment when the president… I don’t know that you could say he baited or provoked them, but he certainly was very happy when he got the response he got from Republicans on issues like whether or not they’re going to hold the economy hostage and not raise the debt limit, whether or not they’re going to cut Social Security or Medicare.

And he milked that moment. Once the Republicans started responding. You saw people like Marjorie Taylor [Greene], when we couldn’t hear what she said, but she was shouting at him. And Lauren Boebert… He engaged, he loved it. And and that is the moment you’re going to remember. And to the degree that people had questions about the vigor and the resilience of this president, he did as well as he could tonight.

JAKE TAPPER: An in-kind contribution from Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.

Biden wasn’t so shy before the midterms, when he happily named names of Republicans who supported the proposal he described.

Watch above via MSNBC.

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