CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, Pennsylvania — Bill Barr, who twice served as the attorney general of the United States, said watching the presidential debate Thursday night between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump left him mad.
“I was a little angry,” he said bluntly. “And wondering who are the people who have essentially encouraged and enabled this person to think they can run for a second term when you’re facing what our country is facing with such major challenges.”
Barr was in suburban Pittsburgh for a policy roundtable event on public safety issues with combat veteran Dave McCormick, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate who is seeking to unseat three-term incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) this November.
Barr said Biden’s performance at the debate, which showed him slackjawed when the cameras went to a split screen, unable to finish sentences, and failing to offer the voters his vision for the future of the country, lets the country down.
“The people who would benefit from his being in office and so forth, personally, putting this guy forward, and then trying to persuade the voters by trying to pull one over on the American people that this guy’s perfectly fit to handle the presidency? I’m angry about it,” he said.
For months, Democrats and left-leaning cable news organizations such as CNN and MSNBC, as well as the Washington Post, have either downplayed or outright attacked videos of Biden either standing motionless or guided offstage or freezing midsentence, claiming the videos were manipulated clips promoted by Republicans, or, in the Washington Post’s words, shared in “bad faith.”
Just last week, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stridently dismissed the videos, calling them “cheapfakes.”
One week later, the debate showed that those videos truly reflected Biden’s state and led to the jaw-dropping call from the New York Times editorial board on Friday to call for Biden to drop out of the race.
McCormick, who was with Barr on the campaign bus after the event, said he watched the debate from his home in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill.
“My initial reaction was one of sadness because clearly President Biden is now at a point where he’s not capable, I don’t think, to be responsible to the job,” he said.
McCormick said that sadness went to one of concern: “As a combat veteran, thinking about that’s my commander in chief. That person’s going to make terrible decisions at a time of crisis, when we’re being threatened from around the world, a person who didn’t even remember that 13 people died on his watch.”
During the debate, Biden falsely said, “The truth is, I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any this — this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world like [Trump] did.”
Clearly forgetting about the 16 troops who lost their lives in overseas attacks over his first term in the White House, including the 13 killed in the Kabul, Afghanistan, airport bombing on Aug. 26, 2021, in that chaotic withdrawal mission and another three in Jordan who died less than five months ago.
McCormick said, “This is a person, that if you’re imagining the pressure of making the right decision as relates to Iran or Ukraine or China, and it makes me wonder beyond the question of whether he should run again, whether he’s capable of fulfilling the responsibilities of the president for the remainder of his term, which is a question that’s posed by the 25th Amendment.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The 25th Amendment provides mechanisms for both a voluntary interim transfer of presidential powers to the vice president and an involuntary transfer of such powers whenever the president is deemed unable to discharge the duties of the office.
“The Joe Biden we saw, at least during part of that debate, is the one they see every day in the situation, trying to make those decisions that have profound effect for the lives and livelihoods of Americans,” McCormick said. ”I think that’s a really serious question.”
