Morning Joe Contrasts First Press Conferences: Biden is a ‘Problem Solver’ While Trump Delivered ‘A Bunch of Lies’
Morning Joe opened Friday’s show with a neatly edited montage designed to compare and contrast the first press conferences of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump from roughly four years ago.
The purpose of the montage? To illustrate the different approaches that each man is taking in their first months in office, that elevates Biden significantly.
Or, as Joe Scarborough said of Biden shortly after the video segment aired, “You actually heard somebody that was trying to bring Americans together. Somebody who said, ‘I’ve been elected to be a problem solver. To bring this country together,’ as opposed to, again, Donald Trump being extraordinarily combative, a couple of weeks in, talking about no president has ever done as much as I.”
In case viewers missed the point, the Morning Joe host said of Trump, particularly his first press conference, “it was just — it was all about him. It was all a bunch of lies.”
The reviews of Biden’s first press conference have fallen pretty consistently along predictable partisan lines. Media outlets designed to criticize Biden have done as much, while others less so.
Morning Joe producers felt the need to open Friday’s show with a comparison to Trump, which suggests an issue that the Biden Administration will likely need to face, and that is this: the favorable comparison to his predecessor will only go so far. At some point, Biden will need to be something other than “Not Trump.”
Using clips of the past president to illustrate the positives of the Biden presidency is a tortured expression of the soft bigotry of the low expectations.
At some point, Morning Joe, and many other media outlets, must divorce themselves from the Trump era and adjudge the current president on his own terms, and not purely as different than the guy that came before him.
Watch above via MSNBC.
