During a virtual event with AFL-CIO members Monday night, a seemingly exhausted and befuddled Joe Biden appeared to ask his staff to “move up” a teleprompter before he could answer a question.
The request came right after a barista named Rebecca Vedrine asked the Democrat presidential nominee what his administration planned to do to help 60 million non-union workers vote for union jobs.
“What would you do to help give them that chance?” Vedrine asked.
“Move it up here,” the sleepy-looking Biden ordered his staff. After a long pause, he began a long and highly detailed answer:
There used to be a basic bargain in this country. Worker shared in the wealth their work help create. It didn’t go well. They shared in the losses as well, but that bargain’s broken. CEOs are more beholding to shareholders and workers. Instead of boosting wages, they’re increasing stock buy backs and their own pay. 30 years ago, the average CEO fortune 500 companies made 58 times the average worker’s salary. Today, 30 years later, it’s 278 times. What in God’s name happened in the meantime?
Joe Biden is relying on a teleprompter to answer questions: "move it up here," he tells his staff.
There are long pauses between his words as he waits for the prompter to scroll. pic.twitter.com/zYlMbfd2mA
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) September 7, 2020
The rest of his scripted answer can be read here.
“I hope the press digs into this,” wrote former Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer on Twitter. “Did Biden really have the answer to this Q pre-loaded into his teleprompter? This is why we have the press: to dig in and get answers.”
President Trump retweeted Fleischer’s tweet, adding the comment, “Wow!”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 9, 2020
Fox News commentator Greg Gutfeld said Tuesday afternoon that Biden seemed to be “out of gas.”
“It’s kind of like when you drive a lemon off the lot and it doesn’t make it to the highway,” Gutfeld noted on “the Five.”
Biden’s former White House stenographer meanwhile told Fox’s Laura Ingraham that the former VP is a “different guy” than the man he worked with four years ago.
“That’s not Joe Biden. That’s a shell of his former self,” said Mike McCormick, who worked as a White House stenographer for 15 years and with the former vice president from 2011 to 2017.
“Joe Biden is a different guy than he was. He doesn’t have the same vitality. I listened to every word Joe Biden spoke,” he explained.
McCormick worked under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, as well as one year under Donald Trump, and is the author of Joe Biden Unauthorized: And the 2020 Crackup of the Democratic Party.
This book is an insider’s look at how Biden and the Obama White House covered up the vice president’s corrupt dealings in Ukraine.
McCormick said he wrote it because “there was a lot of things I saw that America needs to know.”