Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden finally took a real question from a reporter on Wednesday — after largely avoiding questions from reporters for quite some time — and it didn’t go well.
Fox News reporter Peter Doocy managed to get in a question at the end of an event where Biden spoke and asked the 77-year-old about past comments that he made about the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent actions that he took.
“You said that you warned President Trump in January that there was going to be a pandemic and what needed to be done,” Doocy said. “If you knew that, then why were you still hosting crowded campaign rallies in March?”
Biden struggled to give a coherent response as he repeatedly made false claims, like suggesting that he was the first person to call for using the Defense Production Act.
Biden has repeatedly tried to falsely claim that he was the first to call for numerous actions to be taken in response to the coronavirus pandemic when, in reality, President Donald Trump had already taken action on those issues.
The Daily Wire highlighted 7 such examples:
- Biden called for coronavirus tests to be free 9 days after Trump signed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act.
- Biden called for coronavirus testing to be available nationwide 12 days after Trump announced that testing was available in all 50 states.
- Biden called for “cooperation” between the federal government and the states after numerous Democrat governors praised Trump for his work with them.
- Biden announced support for barring entry into the U.S. for individuals who had been to China 2 months after Trump announced a travel ban on China.
- Biden called for a CDC team to go into China 50 days after the Trump administration took action.
- Biden claimed that he called for the Defense Production Act to be used “before anyone,” which came shortly after Trump announced plans to use it.
- Biden called for someone to be put in charge of handling the coronavirus response 5 weeks after Trump tapped Vice President Mike Pence to lead the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
On social media, Biden was widely accused of attempting to deflect from having to answer the question because Biden reportedly held eight rallies in March while Trump only held one, and nearly all of Biden’s rallies happened after Trump’s rally.
WATCH:
. @pdoocy just grabbed Joe Biden on his way out and asked why he was still hosting rallies in MARCH if he was supposedly warning Trump about the seriousness of COVID-19 in JANUARY.
Biden had no response whatsoever and went on a long rant to deflect from his hypocrisy. pic.twitter.com/astVPWosGO
— Kelb Hull (@CalebJHull) September 2, 2020
TRANSCRIPT:
JOE BIDEN: I know you always ask a hostile question, but go ahead.
FOX NEWS REPORTER: You said that you warned President Trump in January that there was going to be a pandemic and what needed to be done. If you knew that, then why were you still hosting crowded campaign rallies in March?
BIDEN: No, what I talked about was, not what had to be done, what I said, you got to take this seriously. You’ve got to insist that we have access to Wuhan. Insist that we have access in China to find out for ourselves, we had 44 people from CDC there. You cannot continue to talk about, the president of China saying he’s done a marvelous job, he’s doing a great job. When it got up to March, I kept saying, look, you got to invoke, you remember, I think I was the first, I may be mistaken, person calling about the Defense Production Act. We don’t have enough of the I, I, it’s amazing, we use a phrase like PPE and the public knows what that is now, but protective gear and ventilators, use that authority. Use it to go out there now and don’t wait, and don’t wait to talk about the need for us to have masks, and don’t wait to talk about—that’s when I, what I talked about. And then I began to lay out for him, we actually had a conversation, I can’t remember when it was, I think it was March, maybe it was April, in that range, and I said, he said, Biden wants to help I want to talk to him, so I talked to him. I laid out what I thought should be done to be able to reopen safely, and the things we should do, and he was very polite, he listened, and he said he’d think about it, and that was the end of it.
And so, what I would begin to become really clear is that as the science began to show that this was able to spread much more easily than people thought, two issues, was a pandemic coming? And how did it most … what’s the most, the way it did the most damage? And as that became clearer and clearer, we concluded that we just can’t continue to have these large rallies and, uh, you know, think about it, here we are, the rest of the world, places that have done extremely well in terms of dealing with this COVID crisis around the world. You know, we have the five largest countries in Europe have a population larger than the United States of America, yet we’re in the month of August, we’re losing a thousand lives a day and they’re losing 57 a day, combined, combined. All of them, combined. So, I just don’t, as we learn more, and we did learn more [and] by, by March and April, we knew a whole heck of a lot more. Why weren’t we doing what needed to be done? Why are we being told that, don’t we have plenty of protective gear? And the one big thing that I did push a lot on, I wasn’t the only one, was on the need for testing and tracing and moving rapidly to make sure that you had the capacity to test and trace before it got so out of control. We need to do that now.
But here’s the thing and I’ll end with this, I apologize for keeping you … the thing that I, I, I just don’t quite understand is when it’s clear that some of the things that the president says are simply not true, relating to this crisis, and when enormous pressure is put on professionals in the administration from the CDC to NIH, across the board, why do we think, God willing, when we get a vaccine that is good, works, why do we think the public’s going to line up to be able to take the, uh, be willing to take the injection? We’ve lost so much confidence, the American people, in what’s said, because we’re finding out, again today, plasma, well, that doesn’t quite work the way we were told it was, hell of a lot of pressure put on that person to say that. This president has said so many things that are untrue, that are just wrong, in order to do anything, he looks at it in one way, if the stock market is high, and it’s moving, and we’re reducing the number of people who are in real trouble economically, then it doesn’t matter what I say. That’s the objective. That’s the objective. The objective is to keep the American people safe so we can begin to get back to normal, rebuilding our economy, and bringing back economic growth.