CLAY: Things have gotten so bad for Joe Biden, in fact, that even his allies in the media — the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and (with the exception of Joy Reid) MSNBC. Even people there are turning on him, including Maggie Haberman, who effectively say Joe Biden has been lying. She’s with the New York Times. Here’s what she said.
HABERMAN: The administration has given a number of different reasons as to why it was that the evacuations out of Afghanistan did not take place sooner, and those are often in conflict. Sometimes they are blaming Afghanis — Afghans. Sometimes they’re blaming processing in the U.S. systems. Sometimes they are blaming the Trump administration. There is no clear through line. I don’t think it’s hubris. I don’t think that is what this is.
I do think it is a policy choice that President Biden has stuck with for some time and been consistent about. But he said something publicly that did not turn out to be true. And at the end of the day, public officials get judged on that and they have yet to give a coherent answer as to why things went wrong the way they did and how they want to try to fix them.
BUCK: Clay, this is what’s so difficult about trying to analyze what’s really happened with the Biden administration on this issue because they keep changing story, right? You recall we were here together on the show just a couple of days ago; they introduced this, “Oh, we had no choice, because Taliban was advancing so rapidly this year,” meaning back in April and March —
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: — that U.S. forces were gonna have to be deployed en masse in order to meet them in the battlefield. It wouldn’t have been enough just to give air support. Now, that’s a whole separate conversation of what we were told initially. It’s not what we were told in July when Biden said —
CLAY: July 8th.
BUCK: — they would fight right?
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: And so that undermines that narrative, and then it was… I can’t even keep it straight. Neither can Biden, he says four days, 40 days, whatever. But a couple days ago it was, “We prepared for every contingency.” Clay, this from people that I’m talking to who are in contact with folks right now in Kabul today. That is a lie. Biden is lying to us when he says that.
CLAY: He’s lying, and the American public is taking note. Because one of the questions we had early this week, Buck, on Monday when this whole Afghanistan mess started to unspool itself, we said, “Hey, it’s a long way away. There are a lot of things going on domestically. How much is the American public going to pay attention to the situation in Afghanistan?”
The answer has been “a great deal,” and we’re starting to get some of these early polls results. Joe Biden is underwater in terms of people who are approving of his presidency even in the polls that we know that can be highly inaccurate. What’s significant here, Buck, is I think we are seeing people who are reasonable Democrats — and I do believe some of them exist — swing voters, independents.
We already knew — most of our audience knew — that Joe Biden was not up to this job. But what they’re seeing, Buck, is the lies of Afghanistan are connecting with the lies on inflation, with the lies on the border, with the lies on covid, and they’re all spiraling together.
And Joe Biden’s big calling card was, “You can trust me; I will make things normal.” And what many Americans are now saying is, “Well, we can’t trust this man and this administration.” And far from making things normal, abnormal has become the coin of the realm. He’s not making things go back to what they were like several years ago when calmness might have existed.
BUCK: Clarissa Ward, who was the CNN reporter who is… Look, I call balls and strikes. I give credit where it’s due. She’s the one person that I’ve seen in years who makes CNN look like it actually sometimes does news. Credit where it’s due.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: She single-handedly bringing the reputation of the entire news organization up from the ashes. But, anyway, she’s on the ground doing a lot of reporting right in and around the Kabul airport, and here she is on the reality of this evacuation. Remember, Biden says they prepared for every contingency. This is going according to plan. It’s a little bit like Frank the Tank. “Keep your composure!”
CLAY: Old School.
BUCK: “Everyone keep their composure!”
CLAY: Old School reference for a nice Friday.
BUCK: It is not prepared. They did not prepare for every contingency. But, anyway, here’s Clarissa Ward. Play it.
WARD: I’ve now spent more than 12 hours watching this whole process as it plays out, and it is very disorganized. And, by the way, you know, off the record, these guys will tell you that. It’s totally disorganized. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. It’s an enormous operation. There are many different nationalities involved. You know, we’ve seen planes for Romanians, Hungarians, the French, the Italians.
There’s so many different contingencies who are involved. You have multiple entrances to this airport. We’re trying to negotiate with the Taliban, deal with our NATO allies, and, frankly, so far, I mean, it’s just about moving along. But I was shocked when I came today, because listening to the talking points that I was hearing from the Pentagon and the White House, I thought this whole thing was moving along swimmingly now.
CLAY: This is her today, Buck, saying what she’s seeing on the ground. I want to build on your praise a little bit, because we do try to call balls and strikes and be fair, unlike many other people in the media. This is when journalists actually have real value, Buck, when they can bring you — with their ability on the ground — information that doesn’t exist elsewhere.
I’m not talking about people who want to spread propaganda and talking points. What she is doing right there on the ground in Kabul with almost no one else around, is she is illuminating the disconnect between the Pentagon, the White House, the State Department — all of these talking points that they are putting out and that Joe Biden’s probably gonna put out again — and actual reality on the ground, which is the essence of the job:
Bring us better information than we would otherwise have and show us what’s really taking place. She deserves a lot of praise. High risk. I know you’ve had interaction with her before, Buck, but this is where journalism can actually be valuable to the masses in a big way.
BUCK: I always say journalism is essentially a fiction in this country, but there are some journalists. They do exist.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: They just are about one in a hundred of the people that go around calling themselves journalists. So back to the crisis here, not just the imminent situation in Afghanistan… By the way, you have no flights now. Oh, sorry. Evacuation flights. As I’m saying this, they say, “Oh, they’re actually gonna start back up.” They hadn’t had any for, I believe it was eight hours.
CLAY: Eight hours.
BUCK: It’s just reported in the last few minutes. So they had no evacuation flights going out. Now they’re restarting extradition flights soon. We don’t know what exactly that means. But they say it will happen soon. But Clay, this is where you pull back and you say, “Leadership. When it comes to foreign policy in particular, the presidency really matters.”
When it comes to what we’re seeing play out here, it’s the guy at the top who’s making the decisions. And people are seeing this and understanding this is a really bad situation. This is something where you must lose — and I don’t just mean the situation on the ground. I mean, who’s in the White House. You have to lose confidence if you were somebody that believed Joe Biden knew what the heck he was doing, was a steady hand on the wheel. I want any other hand on the wheel than Joe Biden right now.
CLAY: (chuckles)
BUCK: It’s a disaster.
CLAY: Not only that we should mention the eight hours ’cause I know time zones are complicated. This is no flights taking off for eight hours during daylight, which would theoretically be the safest time for people to be able to enter into the airport and also the safest time for flights to be taking off, because, as anyone out there would know, as you get into it being dark, danger increases exponentially there.
And so this is a failure of daylight in terms of people being able to take off, and it’s going to continue to run. The reality of what life is on the ground right now in Kabul is gonna continue to disconnect and create this discordant symmetry between what the story is coming out of Washington, D.C., and the Biden administration and what the reality is on the ground in this incredibly pressure-packed and dangerous moment.
Biden to speak soon, and then — again, I think we have to keep hammering this, Buck, because it’s significant. Then he’s going to go on vacation over the weekend. Don’t you want this guy in the White House, whoever the president is, monitoring this on minute by minute basis.
BUCK: Sure. Shouldn’t he not be on the golf course getting updates occasionally from aides? You would think that the White House… I’ll say this. The Obama administration, for all of the enormous criticism (chuckling) that I gave them for eight years, they were pretty into the optics. They would try to manage the perception of the…
They had a tremendous amount of help because the media was in their pocket and all the rest. I get it. But this Biden White House, the media is all on their team, too. But they seem so incompetent that they can’t even control the optics, and that’s why that photo, for example, that was put out of Biden sitting in the Camp David command center or whatever.
CLAY: By himself.
BUCK: It looked ridiculous.
