AS POLLS SLIP, BIDEN SEEKS MEDIA HELP. Sunday brought more bad news for President Joe Biden in the form of a new CNN poll showing former President Donald Trump leading Biden by 6 points, 49% to 43%, in a head-to-head national matchup, and by 9 points, 42% to 33%, in a race that includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and some minor left-wing candidates. A worrisome detail in the poll was that it was taken from April 18 to April 23, when Trump’s trial in New York was underway and the subject of intense media coverage. Voters knew Trump was facing felony charges, they heard about the case against him every day, and more still preferred Trump to Biden.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that even as he was receiving the latest negative polling, Biden was asking the press to go tougher on Trump. Trump supporters might roll their eyes at that — how could the press be any tougher on Trump than they already are? — but Biden took two high-profile opportunities to tell journalists that they should go even harder on the former president.
The first was Biden’s hourlong interview on Friday with SiriusXM radio host Howard Stern. It’s easy to see why Biden chose Stern. At 70, Stern is far past his shock-jock days and can deliver a special brand of fawning in a friendly interview. His discussion with Biden was a very, very friendly interview.
At one point, the two men discussed the state of the media. “I am so afraid for our democracy right now,” Stern said. “There are no editors anymore,” Biden responded. “I’m doing the Gridiron Dinner on Saturday,” Biden continued, apparently referring to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, at which Biden was scheduled to speak. In any event, Biden went on: “The serious thing I’m going to say at the Gridiron Dinner is that, you know, paraphrasing, Jefferson said a choice between what we have and a free press, I’d pick a free press.”
The problem with today’s free press, Biden said, is that it is afraid to attack Trump. Really. “Guess what? The free press is not speaking up as much as it used to,” Biden explained. “I haven’t figured it out yet, but I think it’s coming around. And I’m not blaming the press, I’m just saying I think some of them are worried about attacking him [Trump], worried about taking him on.” Stern wholeheartedly agreed.
The next day, Biden appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington. Some critics called the affair a “lovefest,” and they were pretty much right. Trump, you’ll remember, declined to attend the dinner during his four years in the White House — a particularly damaging situation for an event that runs on proximity to presidential power. Biden returned the presidency to the dinner, to the everlasting gratitude of some in the press. But now, November’s election threatens to bring the return of Trump and four more lean years. So perhaps there was a special love and gratitude for Biden this year, with the knowledge that it might be the last for a while.
So it was a lovefest. And in his remarks, Biden did what only a president confident of his support in the press would do: He both insulted his audience and told them what to do — in this case, to go after Trump. “Some of you complain that I don’t take enough of your questions,” he said. “No comment.” Of course, Biden’s refusal to sit down for serious interviews is a real problem, to which his further comment was: “I have higher standards. I do interviews with strong independent journalists who millions of people actually listen to, like Howard Stern.”
Biden spent a good deal of his speech targeting Trump. “I’ve had a great stretch since the State of the Union,” he said, “but Donald has had a few tough days lately. You might call it stormy weather.” In the recent past, Biden has made jokes about the Democratic lawfare campaign bankrupting Trump and keeping him off the campaign trail. This joke, of course, was a reference to the elected Democratic district attorney of Manhattan’s case against Trump over allegedly false bookkeeping.
An appearance at the dinner is not normally thought of as a campaign speech, but Biden made it one. “The defeated former president has made no secret of his attack on our democracy,” Biden told the crowd. “He promised a ‘blood bath’ when he loses again. We have to take this seriously.” (The “blood bath” reference is a misleading characterization of Trump’s actual remark, which Biden surely knows, but he uses it all the time anyway.)
“Eight years ago, you could have written it off as just Trump talk,” Biden told the reporters in the room. “But no longer. Not after Jan. 6.” Then came his instructions for covering his and Trump’s campaigns: “I’m sincerely not asking of you to take sides but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment, move past the horse-race numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions, the sideshows that have come to dominate and sensationalize our politics, and focus on what’s actually at stake. I think, in your hearts, you know what’s at stake. The stakes couldn’t be higher.”
One way to summarize Biden’s remarks is that he asked the press to stop focusing on his own problems and keep their eyes on Trump. God love ya — go after him, not me.
One non-journalist who was fully on board was the night’s entertainment, Colin Jost, who is a cast member of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. As befitted the evening, Jost took the gentlest of jabs at Biden and spent much more time on Trump. “Let me see if I can summarize where this race stands at this moment,” Jost said. “The Republican candidate for president owes half a billion in fines for bank fraud and is currently spending his days farting himself awake during a porn star hush money trial, and the race is tied?”
You get the idea. There were plenty more Trump lines — often about his trials, but sometimes in jokes like this: “Now that O.J. is dead, who is the new front-runner for Trump’s VP? Is it Diddy? By the way, I bet if Trump did select Diddy as his running mate, I bet this race would still be tied.” You can be the judge of the humor.
Like Howard Stern the day before, Jost appeared to realize that flattery is the coin of the realm at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. And so Jost ended with an extended remembrance of his 95-year-old grandfather, a Staten Island firefighter who died this year and with whom Jost was close. “You remind me of him,” Jost told Biden. “Some of your best qualities remind me of his.”
“He voted for you in the last election that he ever voted in,” Jost said to Biden. “He voted for you, and the reason that he voted for you is because you’re a decent man. My grandpa voted for decency, and decency is why we’re all here tonight. Decency is how we’re able to be here tonight. Decency is how we’re able to make jokes about each other, and one of us doesn’t go to prison after. … So Mr. President, I thank you for your decency on behalf of my grandfather.”
That was the end of the dinner. Just as an aside — as Hillary Clinton did earlier, it is remarkable when anti-Trump voices congratulate themselves for not imprisoning their opposition, even as Trump faces a maximum of 136 years in prison in a prosecution that even some critics have suggested is weak and politically motivated. But they do. In any event, the dinner seemed far away from the world in which Trump leads Biden by 6 points and majorities view Trump’s presidency as a success and Biden’s as a failure — in other words, the rest of America.
