WATCH: White House Reporters Compete for Most Clownish Question on Biden’s Bombshell Statement About Putin

White House reporters held a close competition for who could be most clownish when asking President Joe Biden about the bombshell closing line to his speech in Poland.

On Saturday, President Biden closed his speech  at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Poland with nine words about Vladimir Putin that instantly made news: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

What followed was a media freakout of appropriately berserk proportions, but not for appropriate reasons. Immediately, the remark was seized upon as a policy pivot to regime change in Russia that a clarifying statement — widely characterized as a “walkback” — did nothing to quell.

And when the president took questions from reporters following remarks on his Fiscal Year 2023 Budget Proposal Monday, the clownery began.

Kelly O’Donnell of NBC News — which has become the most reliable source of pure, high-octane dumbassery on the White House beat — kicked things off by asking if the president “regretted” the remark. The president replied he had no regrets and wasn’t walking back a damn thing:

MS. O’DONNELL: Do you believe what you said — that Putin can’t remain in power? Or do you now regret saying that? Because your government has been trying to walk that back. Did your words complicate matters?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, you asked three different questions, and I’ll answer them all.

Number one, I’m not walking anything back. The fact of the matter is I was expressing the moral outrage I felt toward the way Putin is dealing, and the actions of this man — just — just the brutality of it. Half the children in Ukraine. I had just come from being with those families.

And so — but I want to make it clear: I wasn’t then, nor am I now, articulating a policy change. I was expressing the moral outrage that I feel, and I make no apologies for it.

MS. O’DONNELL: Your personal feelings, sir? Your personal feelings?

THE PRESIDENT: Personal. My personal feelings.

Secondly, you asked me about — what was the second part?

MS. O’DONNELL: Does it complicate the diplomacy of this moment?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I don’t think it does. You know, the — the fact is that we’re in a situation where — what complicates the situation at the moment is the — the escalatory efforts of Putin to continue to engage in carnage — the kind of behavior that — that makes the whole world say, “My God, what is this man doing?” That’s what complicates things a great deal.

And — but I don’t think it complicates it at all.

Obviously, the president isn’t going to apologize for saying Putin shouldn’t remain in power, so the question serves only to promote an absurd suggestion — along with the notion that it is President Biden’s 3-second phrase, not Putin’s relentless campaign of butchery, that is the obstacle to peace.

O’Donnell’s question was followed by a string of lesser dumbasseries that continued to miss the point. One reporter similarly asked Biden if he thought “this remark might escalate the conflict?”

“No, I’m not. I’m not at all,” Biden replied.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins had arguably the best exchange with Biden, since she elicited an answer that should have been revealing to the rest of her colleagues:

MS. COLLINS: So, if saying he cannot remain in power does not mean regime change, what does it mean in your view?

THE PRESIDENT: It means that I would hope — I just was expressing my outrage. He shouldn’t remain in power. Just like, you know, bad people shouldn’t continue to do bad things.

But it doesn’t mean we have a fundamental policy to do anything to take Putin down in any way.

MS. COLLINS: What made you add that? Because that wasn’t in your prepared remarks, we were told. So what made you add that at the end, Mr. President?

THE PRESIDENT: Because I was talking about — I was talking to the Russian people. The last part of the speech was talking to the Russian people, telling them what we thought. And I was communicating this to not only the Russian people, but the whole world.

This is — this is just stating a simple fact that this kind of behavior is totally unacceptable — totally unacceptable — and the way to deal with it is to strengthen and pu- — and put — keep NATO completely united and to help Ukraine where we can.

What followed, instead, was a brutal exchange in which Biden carved up Fox News’ Peter Doocy like a corned beef brisket that sat in the pot too long. But Doocy actually gave the president a terrific opportunity to respond to three bad-faith interpretations of recent remarks, an opportunity he took full advantage of.

Doocy gets a little bit of credit for being more agenda-driven than stupid, but he blew the dismount by defending his silly request for details on the U.S. response to a hypothetical chemical attack.

ABC News’ Mary Bruce used her question to ask the president to consider whether Putin might use the remarks as an excuse to escalate. The president was unequivocal.

MS. BRUCE: Mr. President, thank you. You’ve said that you’re confident that your comment won’t undermine diplomatic efforts, but just to be clear, are you confident that Vladimir Putin sees it that way — that he will not use this as an escalatory —

THE PRESIDENT: I don’t care what he thinks.

Look, here’s the deal: He’s going to do what he’s going to do. Putin — look —

MS. BRUCE: But you’re not concerned that he may see your language and view that as a sign of a reason for escalation — use that as an excuse to escalate, given —

THE PRESIDENT: No.

MS. BRUCE: — his recent behavior?

THE PRESIDENT: Given his recent behavior, you should — excuse me, I shouldn’t say that to you — given his recent behavior, people should understand that he is going to do what he thinks he should do. Period. He’s not affected by anybody else, including, unfortunately, apparently his own advisors.

Now, a lot of people on my side are mad about this freakout simply because it has been so over-the-top (it has been) and is part of a pattern of coverage that has been relentlessly anti-Biden (it is) and, shall we say, conducive to Russian talking points (that’s also a Bingo!).

But the biggest problem is that they’re missing the very obvious subtext of Biden’s remark about Putin, and his fairly clear answers in that press conference. Biden can’t say that he’s calling for regime change, and he certainly isn’t going to make it U.S. policy to support regime change.

As the president told Collins, though, his audience is the Russian people, the sorts of people who could decide to replace their leader by any number of means. You might even call his remark and his responses ambiguous in an almost strategic kind of way.

This is a press corps that has relentlessly clamored for escalation, for Biden to draw red lines, to make explicit threats based on hypotheticals. On Saturday, the president delivered a rhetorical and moral gut punch to Putin, and their response is to do everything in their power to deflect it.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.