Democrat President Joe Biden reportedly called Fox New reporter Peter Doocy on Monday evening after he called Doocy a “stupid son of a b***t” during an event earlier in the day.
“After years of clips of the president and I kind of mixing it up on the campaign trail and during the transition and here at the White House, within about an hour of that exchange, he called my cellphone and he said, ‘It’s nothing personal, pal.'” Doocy said. “And we went back and forth, and we were talking about just kind of moving forward, and I made sure to tell him that I’m always gonna try to ask something different than what everybody else is asking. And he said, ‘You got to.’ And that’s a quote from the president, so I’ll keep doing it.”
When asked by Fox News host Sean Hannity if Biden apologized, Doocy responded, “He cleared the air and I appreciated it, we had a nice call.”
Hannity laughed, noting that it seemed like Doocy was not answering the question of whether or not Biden apologized.
“He said, ‘It’s nothing personal, pal,'” Doocy again reiterated.
NEW: Peter Doocy reveals Biden called him "within an hour" after he called him "a stupid son of a b****": "[W]ithin about an hour of that…he called my cell phone & he just said, 'it's nothing personal, pal' & we went back and forth & we were talking about…moving forward." pic.twitter.com/TN0DnXyRUn
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) January 25, 2022
.@SeanHannity: "Did he apologize?"
Doocy: "He did clear the air & I appreciate it. We had a nice call."
Hannity: "He — that's not an answer. Did he apologize? That doesn't sound like an apology."
Doocy: "He said, 'it's nothing personal pal.'" pic.twitter.com/g8GPfcHOk5
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) January 25, 2022
“Do you think inflation is a political liability for midterms?” Doocy asked Biden at the event earlier in the day.
“It’s a great asset, more inflation,” Biden responded. “What a stupid son of a b****.”
Doocy responded to the incident during an appearance on Fox News immediately after the incident.
“I couldn’t even hear him because people were shouting at us to get out,” Doocy said. “But somebody came up to me in the briefing room a few minutes later and said, ‘did you hear what the President said?’ And I said, ‘no, what?’ They said, ‘he called you a stupid SOB, and I said, ‘did he say SOB?’ And the person said, ‘no.’”
“So, Doocy, I think the president’s right, you are a stupid SOB,” Fox News host Jesse Watters joked.
“Yeah, nobody has fact-checked him yet and said it’s not true,” Doocy joked back.
.@JesseBWatters: "So Doocy, I think the President's right. You are a stupid S.O.B."@pdoocy: "Yeah, nobody has fact-checked him yet and said it's not true."
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 24, 2022
The exchange came after Larry Summers, who served as Treasury Secretary under former President Bill Clinton and director of the National Economic Council under former President Barack Obama, warned earlier this month that the U.S. is moving toward “higher entrenched inflation.”
“I think the data flow is saying what I’ve thought for quite some time that, yes, there are transitory elements in inflation, and very likely they will recede, but we are basically moving towards higher entrenched inflation,” Summers said. “It’s there in expectations, it’s there in wages, it’s there in labor shortages, it’s there in the pervasive pattern across many different prices.”
“And people try to excuse it by picking this figure and that figure from month to month, but we’ve got an overheated economy, and the Fed’s gonna have a very real challenge of cooling that economy off and doing it in a controlled way,” he continued. “That has not been done very successfully in the past. So it’s going to be a very challenging year for macroeconomic policy.”
When asked if top White House officials were right in saying that the inflation problem was a result of “a supply side problem,” Summers responded, “No, he’s wrong.”
“We have a massive, overheated labor market,” Summers continued. “We have the highest ratio of vacancies to unemployment in the country’s history, by a large margin. We have shortages of labor, in everything from psychotherapy, to McDonalds, in everything from investment analysts to gardeners, that suggests a surfeit of purchasing power and demand relative to the capacity of the economy to produce and unless we bring those things into balance, we’re going to have not just higher inflation, but possibly even accelerating inflation. And we need to recognize that we have an overheated economy that we are going to need to cool off.”