In Tuesday’s episode of MK Media’s Next Up, 2WayApp founder and longtime political journalist Mark Halperin pressed friend and former colleague, MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough, on the latter’s infamous March 6, 2024 comments declaring the then-current version of President Joe Biden was the “best Biden ever” and “f-you if you can’t handle the truth.”
NewsBusters readers will recall this was the winner of our 2024 Brian Stelter Memorial Quote of the Year Award.
Scarborough groveled he was simply speaking to the Biden he saw in personal interactions as he wasn’t going to be “pay[ing] more attention to” (viral) videos of the verbal and physical stumbles “than two–and-a-half, three hours I had with a guy one-on-one, going around the world.”
A day later on Morning Joe, Scarborough admitted he was “obviously wrong” to Original Sin co-authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson as he believed Biden was different than others had insisted. Scarborough gave away the game, though, by then admitting he’s “not sure what my takeaway is here, the next time.”
Back to the Halperin interview, Scarborough led into the clip by asserting one of his lengthy conversations with Biden came as a result of a lightly-critical Washington Post column he penned about Biden’s foreign policy. As a result, he believed there was no way Biden was cognitively impaired.
Pay attention to the part of this rant when he talked about how he often receives calls from politicians upset about something he wrote or said about them and then consider he would do that to NewsBusters (click “expand”):
SCARBOROUGH: [T]he wider context, and I remember, early on — no, actually it was — it wasn’t Afghanistan. It was Ukraine, and I wrote a Washington Post op-ed that said Joe Biden needs to stop telling Vladimir Putin what he’s not going to do. Joe Biden needs to start telling, you know, Vladimir Putin what he is going to do, or just keep his mouth shut, basically, and went through all the reasons why, being overly cautious on the issue of Ukraine was not serving our interests because we — we — you know, we needed to keep — keep Putin guessing a bit more than that. Got a call late at night, and as you know, Mika and I go to sleep pretty early cause of our early wake up call — got a call late at night and there’s about a 30-45 minute, pretty one-sided discussion from the President of the United States being — being critical, but more importantly, going in depth as to why he was doing what he was doing and taking me through it and, you know, Mark, you and I have talked to politicians, and I think this is a very important point for people that are — that are listening and maybe skeptical but maybe open-minded about this. You and I have talked to a lot of politicians, and I’m gonna be really blunt. Most politicians that call up and lecture me or lecture you about something we’ve written or said, we sit there and we’re very polite, but rolling our eyes because, you know, they’re usually go — [HALPERIN MAKES TALKING GESTURE WITH HIS HANDS] — yeah, they’re talking, they’re going, they — they — they — they’re doing their talking points, and again, you’re in an interesting position. I’m not gonna debate a presidential candidate or a politician when they’re calling me up complaining about something that I’ve done on the air. I go, thank you very much. I — I appreciate your input, but usually, I hang up the phone and Mika goes who’s that? And I’ll be like, oh, that was fill in the blank. Oh my God, on his talking points, it was pretty embarrassing. I didn’t get that with Biden. I, in fact, when I finished talking to Biden on — on — I guess it was ‘22, late ‘22. I hung up the phone and I said to me I go, he don’t have dementia. Whoa. Because again it was — it was not just cogent, it was a better — really analysis — analysis of the situation than I’d heard from — from most people unless it was, let’s say it was —
HALPERIN: And —
SCARBOROUGH: — Chairman McCaul or somebody running —
HALPERIN: — yeah.
SCARBOROUGH: — running a pertinent committee.
HALPERIN: And you’re confident — and you’re confident if someone heard the audio of that conversation, they would come away with the same conclusion.
SCARBOROUGH: Oh my God. Yeah. Anybody, anybody.
HALPERIN: Anybody.
Scarborough doubled down by citing a mutual friendship he and Biden share in frequent Morning Joe panelist (and plagiarist) Mike Barnicle and thus he would have known if something were wrong.
He also cited an hours-long meeting at the White House days prior to the infamous rant that he claimed featured a President with a better grasp of foreign policy “than 99 percent of” an Washington politician (click “expand”):
SCARBOROUGH: So — so that there were a lot of those meetings. There also there was, again, this two-and-a-half, three-hour meeting that I had with him. I think it was March — maybe have been March of 2024.
HALPERIN: Yeah.
SCARBOROUGH: And we went in, it was supposed to be like an hour lunch, which is not unusual. I — I’ve done it with Donald Trump and been in with Barack Obama. We — we — we go and, you know — pretty regularly, but when I had him there, I was asking him — I wasn’t asking him about the campaign. I was asking him about Ukraine, I was asking about Israel, I was asking about India, which I think was in the news recently and basically took him around the world. I asked him about, you know, our sort of our flex in — in Asia, what was going on in Guam, what was going on in the Philippines, what was going on with Australia, what was going on in South Korea and Japan talking. And he took me — he — he really took me around the world, and I will say if — if you and I lined up 100 Washington politicians, you know, he would have — he would have — handled, he handled those answers better than 99 percent of them…So, I went away from a three-hour meeting with Biden talking about everything from, you know, Bill Burns negotiating, you know, in Russia — is he going to negotiate in Russia and — and — and talking about the West Bank and what he was doing as far as illegal settlements in the West Bank, how — his relationship with Netanyahu, and I went away from there feeling extraordinarily confident.
“The guy was cogent and — and — and beyond — beyond cogent that he actually — more than, again, except for maybe chairmen or chairwomen of — of the relevant committees on Capitol Hill, a better grasp on — on foreign policy than most anybody,” he declared.
This went right into the clip, which our Mark Finkelstein wrote about in real time here.
Halperin broke the ice with a quip: “Okay it’s a lot to unpack there. A lot to unpack there.”
Scarborough started laughing and asserted “that’s actually the first time I’ve seen the clip all the way through, and you were the one like, you know, six months later to alert me to the fact that this had gone viral.”
To this, Halperin insisted “people may not realize you don’t pay much attention to social media anymore” and “[y]ou don’t pay much attention to criticism, but I told you for several months…best Biden ever has become the symbol for the right of the — those media and MSNBC having — having so much Trump derangement syndrome that you’re claiming that a guy who’s clearly lost mental acuity is the best Biden ever.”
For one of the most thin-skinned individuals in the liberal media to claim they’re unfamiliar with what people are saying about them, we have a hard time believing that.
Halperin tried to defend his friend by saying Scarborough happened to have been around Biden “on a good day,” but Scarborough had to interject with an attempted correction: “On good days. On good days, plural.”
“But looking back at that, do you say, well, it was misleading to say best Biden ever without caveat and say, except on the days when he’s not the best Biden,” Halperin asked.
Scarborough scoffed at this because “I never saw those [bad] days, pesronally.”
Halperin pressed him, citing the Jackie Walorski gaffe and said he could “show you the RNC clip reels” as “[t]here were plenty of days in public when he — when he was not the best ever.”
This was when Scarborough tried to equate Biden and Trump and rejected the claims Biden wasn’t mentally capable of running meetings. Rather, he argued, Biden’s short temperament ensured he was in control (click “expand”):
SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, he stumbled —
HALPERIN: And, of course, shortly after —
SCARBOROUGH: — and he stumbled —
HALPERIN: — yeah.
SCARBOROUGH: — he stumbled and bumbled around, Mark. I mean — yeah — he — he certainly did. Donald Trump did, other politicians did, but — but — but it — and it’s actually the same case as a lot of times when I’ve gone in and talked to Donald Trump. We’re going to Donald Trump and I’ve heard the media narrative around Donald Trump, and certainly, I’ve been very critical of Donald Trump, and when I leave, I have a better understanding, just like Jeffrey Goldberg did a couple of weeks ago. I had better understanding of where Donald Trump is mentally. If Donald Trump is — is losing it, like, you know, people have said, through the years or not, and so, again, am I going to look at a clip that’s going viral and — and — and pay more attention to that than two–and-a-half, three hours I had with a guy one-on-one, going around the world? No, I’m just not going to. Are those are — are — are some of the clips bad? Yeah, they certainly — they certainly are bad. I can understand why people would see that without the context and, and say — say that there was a — a — a problem with that, especially because I said start rolling tape right here. You know, it’s like — but — but, you know, when I look at that tape, based on what I saw with Biden, based on the time that I spent with Biden, based on the hundreds of hours that I talked to people who talked to Biden and — and people that worked with Biden and — and we’re with him day in and day out, good friends that I know that I — that I trusted before Biden was President that I trust now that Biden’s not president. I mean, put in the proper context, I’m just not going to freak out and melt down on the — on — on one or two clips here or there. And again, he bumbled around and he stumbled around, but he has for quite some time. That didn’t seem, to me, to get in the way of — of Joe Biden being able to analyze the most important issues and I certainly think he has — has a better grasp on it than, than probably the overwhelming majority of his critics who certainly did when I spoke with him. But again, the — the — the — the question is, you know, who is somebody else running the government for him? Is he incapable of running meetings?
HALPERIN: No, we — we —
SCARBOROUGH: I’ve never talked, I’ve never talked —
HALPERIN: — we agree about that.
SCARBOROUGH: — to anybody that has said, Joe Biden is not capable of running meetings. The complaint that I’ve heard not only from — and I — I hope people are still listening to me because it is important. The only complaints I’ve heard about Biden internally was that he was angry, he would often get angry, and that it was basically his way or the highway.
