OPINION:
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre gave her final press briefing this week, a few days before President Biden leaves the building for the last time. It came not long after she had posted a picture on X of the outgoing White House communications team posing with Mr. Biden.
“The best team in the business,” she wrote, against all evidence to the contrary.
The Biden White House communications team was collectively dishonest about many things and were flagrant, obvious liars about many important things. But before we get to the litany of falsehoods, let’s look at the results achieved by this alleged “best team in the business.”
Mr. Biden will leave office with 64% of Americans disapproving of the job he’s done, according to the last CNN poll on his presidency. That’s about two-thirds of voters giving his administration a thumbs-down, which should not encourage his public relations crew to celebrate being the “best in the business.”
His unpopularity weighed on Vice President Kamala Harris, who took his place on the Democratic ticket after he was forced out of the 2024 race (more on that in a moment). She was a terrible candidate in her own right. Still, Mr. Biden’s dreadful polling certainly didn’t help matters, and the Democrats pulled off the trifecta, losing the White House and also landing in the minority in both the House of Representatives and Senate.
To make it even more painful, the man who vanquished them all was Donald Trump — the same guy who inspires fever dreams in Democrats’ heads every night from coast to coast. Say what you want about the approval ratings at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, but as he prepares to stride triumphantly back into his old oval-shaped office, the reality is stark.
The Biden communications effort can only be described as a complete and total failure because the voters took the White House away from him and gave it right back to Mr. Trump. That’s America labeling the Biden years a mistake.
Now to the lies.
There were many, but the biggest was the years-long coverup of Mr. Biden’s deteriorating cognitive and physical conditions. Time after time, Ms. Jean-Pierre and her communications staff made outrageous claims about his fitness — easily disproven by watching him in action — and asked everyone to believe that Mr. Biden was solving calculus problems in his head while running on a treadmill, chatting with world leaders on speakerphone, and conducting West Wing meetings with three different groups simultaneously.
They lied ridiculously, claiming that decades-younger aides had trouble keeping up with the rapidly declining octogenarian. They rolled out mid-level staffer Andrew Bates, whose credibility was already shot, to deliver the absurd denials and blame Internet videos for making Mr. Biden look bad. And when the world finally saw the real Mr. Biden in his only debate with Mr. Trump in June 2024, millions were shocked because they hadn’t seen evidence of his decrepitude until then.
It should be treated as the greatest political scandal in our nation’s history, and the White House press shop was at the heart of it.
They lied about the U.S. border with Mexico, insisting for three years that security was tighter than ever. When the chaos couldn’t be denied, they blamed Mr. Trump, though Mr. Biden had weakened nearly all Trump border measures in his first few weeks in office.
They lied about inflation, its causes and its effects, and they tried to blame Vladimir Putin and “greedy corporations,” including Big Oil and Big Grocery, instead of the true culprit, Mr. Biden’s outrageous spending.
They lied about job creation, claiming more than 16 million jobs were generated, even though most were jobs that simply returned when the economy reopened after the COVID-19 pandemic.
They lied about Hunter Biden, the president’s son. A lot.
They lied about the infamous laptop. They lied about the sale of Hunter’s artwork. And they lied about whether the president would ever issue a blanket pardon for any and all crimes he’d committed.
They also lied about little things, like changing or removing words in official White House transcripts to erase embarrassing errors and gibberish uttered by Mr. Biden.
There are many more examples, but this space has a word limit.
At the end of the first Trump term, then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Democrat from Maryland, recklessly called for a permanent blacklist for people who merely served in the first Trump administration. He said they should all “live a life of shame.”
But that’s not the point of these criticisms of the Biden communications staff, and I’m not suggesting that anyone be blacklisted at all.
Their train-wreck job performance does that for them all by itself.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and the founder and principal of Line Drive Public Affairs, LLC. He served as a senior advisor on the 2024 Trump campaign and as communications director on the 2020 Trump campaign.
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