Jake Tapper on Friday criticized conservatives like Sean Hannity after the Fox News host, who has long attacked President Joe Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” stated the president was too energetic throughout his State of the Union address.
On The Lead, the CNN anchor famous that previous to Thursday’s deal with, Republicans had been saying that Biden was “previous, weak, gaffe-prone, senile, a pushover.” Tapper then performed a clip of Hannity pivoting away from his typical description of Biden, and as an alternative calling him “Jacked-up Joe” who “seemed like a hyper-caffeinated, indignant previous man.”
“Can Republicans have it each methods?” he requested GOP strategist Alice Stewart. “I imply, this additionally jogs my memory of the truth that they accuse him of being a dumb puppet idiot and likewise this prison mastermind. It simply looks like you’ve acquired to choose a lane right here, proper?”
Stewart’s response was largely in step with how congressional Republicans tended to react to the president’s election yr deal with: that it was too partisan and damaging.
Though Biden “was underneath stress to indicate that he had vim and vigor and stamina to be re-elected,” Stewart stated, he nonetheless “got here throughout—in many individuals’s minds—he got here throughout indignant.”
“He got here throughout stuffed with vengeance. He got here throughout loud and grumpy. And look: this was a partisan speech,” she argued. “He got here proper out of the gate speaking about his predecessor over and over and over and taking it to Donald Trump, as an alternative of speaking in regards to the State of the Union, which is what this was for.”
A bit later, Tapper stated he believed Biden’s speech exceeded many Democrats’ expectations.
“I believe quite a lot of [Democrats] going into it thought…I hope he will get by it. I hope he doesn’t, like, collapse. I hope he doesn’t, like, have some main gaffe,” he stated. “He actually appeared like an 81-year-old, however he didn’t appear incapable of doing the job. So a minimum of that time—Republicans complaining about it being political, et cetera. I’m not saying I disagree with that—however that’s not the identical factor as complaining about him being Weekend at Bernie’s.”
After Stewart replied that “the bar is fairly low,” Tapper countered that it was “Republicans who set the bar there.”
Whereas Stewart credited Biden for getting by the deal with with relative ease, she claimed it was the president who’s truly “making an attempt to have it each methods.”
“He campaigned on being the empathetic candidate—on unity, on normalcy. That was such a divisive speech, and that was so partisan towards Donald Trump,” she claimed. “And he’s speaking about how we’re having a terrific comeback on this nation. It was a nasty speech, and he’s the candidate that’s saying he’s going to be unifying this nation? That speech was very removed from it.”
Tapper’s level in regards to the shifting characterization of Biden by conservatives was made similarly on Fox Information within the subsequent hour by The 5 co-host Jessica Tarlov.
“We’re now speaking about Joe Biden as ‘too fiery,’ as ‘too aggressive.’ And yesterday we have been speaking about, ‘Joe Biden can’t discover his pants. Joe Biden has dementia. Joe Biden is just too previous for this job,’” she recalled. “And that’s how I do know that [the address] went rather well: as a result of the…individuals who would use the age assault at the moment are principally saying he’s an aggressive partisan.”
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