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After a rambling press conference cut short in Vietnam over the weekend, Joe Biden found himself mired in another “what did he say?” moment on 9/11. Biden claimed to have seen the mangled and smoldering pile at Ground Zero the day after the World Trade Center attack, but he didn’t in fact go there until nine days later. WOR White House correspondent Jon Decker has been covering Biden since his days as a U.S. senator from Delaware. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning and tried to offer an explanation for why Biden is compelled to embellish events.
“I can’t explain that,” Decker told Berman and Riedel. “He’s had a history his entire life as a politician of exaggerations, you know… but this is the latest one, and what a day to make that exaggeration, on the 22nd anniversary of 9/11. You know, I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how anybody could be a serial exaggerator, the way the president is, certainly from time to time, you know. It’s unfortunate and it’s not a good moment for him.”
To see if Biden’s ramblings are scripted, ad-libbed, or just drivel, Decker laid out a technique he sometimes uses to see where the 46th president is going in a speech. “He sounds like he’s mumbling to a speech, and oftentimes, if I’m in a place where he’s giving a speech, like the East Room, I’ll follow along with the teleprompter, just to see that, you know, he’s reading it as-is, you know, and not making any asides that are not there on the prepared text.”
Gaffes and senior moments aside, Decker says the Democratic party can’t just tell Biden to step aside for another candidate. “This is who Democrats have bet on, in terms of who their nominee is going to be in 2024… but [dropping Biden is] just not going to happen, as long as Biden wants to run for re-election. He believes he’s the only person who can beat the likely Republican nominee, that’s Donald Trump, and he’s, as far as I know, he’s here to stay. As things stand today…it is a rematch, Biden vs. Trump in 2024.”
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