Where is Joe Biden, asks Michael Goodwin in the New York Post. No president in 100 years has gone longer without facing the media. “Hiding” Biden’s belated debut is billed for next Thursday, more than two months after he took office. You’d have to go back to Calvin Coolidge to find a president slower off the mark – and he invented White House press conferences.
The gaffe-prone Biden has urgent questions to answer. His stimulus bill is a “$1.9 trillion monster that throws money around like a tooth fairy on a drunken binge”, yet he didn’t secure a single Republican vote in favour. What happened to the promised bipartisanship? Then there’s the surge of illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border, which Team Biden is doing “mental gymnastics” to avoid admitting is a crisis. “Kids in cages”, anyone?
A “fair and functioning” media would grill Biden, who is “not as sharp as he was”, on all this and more. But the Washington press corps has “put aside the brass knuckles it used on Trump and taken out the pom-poms”. If there’s reason to fear for the 78-year-old President’s “mental acuity”, we’ll soon know. “The fact that he’s been largely invisible tells me there is.”
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