Former President Obama aides argued it’s becoming "easier and easier to forget" that President-elect Donald Trump isn’t in the White House yet, with President Biden almost absent from the public eye.
On their podcast "Pod Save America," "Obama bros" Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor discussed Trump recently announcing a $100 billion investment from Japanese multinational investment firm Softbank Group.
"It was more or less a standard presidential policy announcement, the main difference being: Trump isn’t president yet!" Favreau exclaimed Tuesday. "A fact that’s getting easier and easier to forget as Joe Biden seems to be disappearing from the public stage as his term comes to an end."
Lovett sarcastically added, "Joe Biden believes in tradition and institutions, and we should only have one president at a time, and I think it’s a surprising choice to allow it to be Donald Trump."
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Vietor conceded that Trump is "very good at using social events" to show off the "kind of pageantry and trappings of the presidency," such as attending the Army-Navy football game, an event Biden had never attended.
Lovett was especially critical of Biden and the Democratic Party in the final year of his presidency, particularly for waiting so long to replace Biden as the nominee.
"I’m trying to separate basically my frustration with Joe Biden in his final year, culminating in that debate and hanging on, and how much we paid for having somebody who just wasn’t an articulate and comprehensive messenger, not just on behalf of his own presidency, but on behalf of progressivism, democracy — and I am very angry about that, and I’m a little bit mad at myself for not being more honest about how I felt or not seeing it as plainly because we’re obviously paying dearly for it," Lovett said.
He added, "I guess what I’m more concerned about than am I seeing Joe Biden enough — maybe he’s right that people don’t want to hear from him — it’s more, like, do I feel confident right now that Joe Biden behind the scenes is thinking of every single way he can try to future-proof the White House?"
The "Obama bros" have been harsh critics of Biden in the past year, acknowledging as far back as February that age would be a major issue for the president.
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Most recently, the podcast attacked Biden for pardoning his son Hunter and making the Democratic Party look "stupid."
"Now everyone looks stupid. Everyone looks like they are full of s---," Vietor said. "And Republicans are going to use this to argue it was politics as usual when Democrats warned of Trump's corruption or threat to the rule or the threat to democracy. And I think that's the piece of this I am most frustrated with, which is Joe Biden looking like a typical, lying politician. And I think that leads to a cynical feeling that all politicians are bad. They are all the same and that this is just par for the course."
