Psaki Awkwardly Smirks as Reporter Savages Her by Listing Off Biden's Failures for 1 Minute Straight
It isn’t as if there have been many good days, but Thursday may have been the worst day of President Joe Biden’s administration so far.
An appeals court struck down most of the administration’s vaccine mandate. The president’s push to invoke the “nuclear option” and do away with the filibuster for the Democrats’ proposed voting overhaul was rebuffed by both Democrat holdouts in the Senate, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who reaffirmed their support for the 60-vote threshold in the upper chamber.
Vice President Kamala Harris gave (another) disastrous interview. The weekly unemployment claims report was a disaster. And, as the U.K. Daily Mail pointed out, Biden’s approval rating reached a new low in a Quinnipiac poll, putting him at 33 percent.
(Not that this should be any surprise; the chickens are coming home to roost — and we’ve been chronicling the entire process since the beginning of the Biden administration here at The Western Journal. You can help us bring readers the truth by subscribing.)
And if Thursday was a bad day, it capped off an awful couple of weeks — as a reporter at Thursday’s White House media briefing pointed out to press secretary Jen Psaki, who smirked awkwardly throughout the whole ordeal.
Keep in mind, this was before the vaccine mandate was struck or it became fully clear that the push to do away with the filibuster on the voting overhaul was deader than a Chicago voter. However, the reporter noted that “frankly, things just seem like they’re going pretty poorly right now for the White House.
“You know, Build Back Better is being blocked. Voting rights is being blocked. Diplomatic talks with Russia doesn’t seem to have brought us back from the brink of war. Inflation is at a 40-year high. The virus is setting records for infection,” he said.
“So, as we kind of hit this one-year period, and a period where everything seems like it’s in pretty rough shape, or nearly everything — which is not an invitation, I guess, to list off some other things — I’m wondering, at what point do you take stock and say that things need to change internally, whether it’s your outreach with the Hill, whether it’s the leadership within the White House,” the reporter said.
“You seem to be stymied on an incredible number of fronts right now,” he added — a relative understatement.
Psaki, still wearing that smirk, told the reporter she would “give you a little bit of a different take on this.” See if you’ve heard this list of greatest hits before:
Please enjoy this reporter just SAVAGING Biden with this BRUTAL question listing Biden’s utter failures for over a minute STRAIGHT as Psaki is forced to listen while she awkwardly smirks
WATCH THIS. pic.twitter.com/sXEFH1LNKN
— Danny De Urbina (@dannydeurbina) January 13, 2022
“More than 200 million people are vaccinated. We’ve had record job growth, record low unemployment rates, historically, in this country, over the last year. We’ve rebuilt our alliances and our relationships around the world,” she said.
“And right now, as it relates to Russia, as you heard our National Security Advisor convey, we’re working with partners around the world to convey very clearly — it’s up to them to make a choice about what’s next. We’re not going to make that on their behalf. It’s up to them to determine if there are going to be crippling economic sanctions or not, or — if they decide to move forward.”
She went on to note that “when you have a small margin and threshold in the Senate, it’s very difficult to get things done and to get legislation passed” — which is true, except for the fact the president just took a major gamble on eliminating the filibuster and lost.
As for Biden’s other big failure in the Senate, Psaki said “we are still continuing to work with members to determine the path forward on Build Back Better, that we have the vast majority of Democrats in the Senate supporting voting rights. That’s a path forward for us.”
Except it’s not if you don’t have the votes of Manchin and Sinema. That slim majority — not actually a majority, but a 50-50 party split with ties decided by the vice president — is predicated upon both of those moderate-ish Democrats going along. On both Build Back Better and doing away with the filibuster for voting overhaul, they don’t have both on board. What path forward, then?
That was unmentioned, but Psaki insisted that, at the White House, “our effort is to do hard things, try hard things, and keep at it. So, we just don’t see it through the same prism.”
[firefly_poll]
OK, then: “So, the sense is things are going well; there’s no need for change right now?” the reporter responded.
Of course, we shouldn’t have expected an actual answer to that, and we didn’t get one; Psaki merely said that “having worked in a White House before, you do hard things in White Houses. You have every challenge at your feet — laid at your feet, whether it’s global or domestically. And we could certainly propose legislation to see if people support bunny rabbits and ice cream, but that wouldn’t be very rewarding to the American people.”
You may indeed do hard things in White Houses, but eventually, the rest of America sees what you do through the prism of results. The “record job growth” the Biden administration boasts of has been below expectations, since it’s actually just regenerating the jobs that were killed off by the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated lockdowns. As for those “rebuilt alliances,” they don’t seem to be deterring Russia from teetering on the brink of war with Ukraine or China from eyeing up Taiwan.
Psaki didn’t even bother coming up with a counter to record inflation — it was up 7 percent last month compared to the year before, the highest spike since 1982 — or a record number of COVID infections when Biden had run his presidential campaign on shutting the disease down cold.
This is the mouthpiece of the White House. A reporter spent an entire minute reading off the failures of the Biden administration. After smirking her way through it, the best Psaki could offer was some weak rhetoric on jobs, doing hard things and looking at this through a different prism.
As for the rest of America, they’re looking at this through the only prism possible: The Biden administration is failing and flailing. Psaki can try to make lemonade out of lemons all she wants, but it’s clear the White House has no sugar to add to the mix.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
