During a White House press conference this week, Biden administration press secretary Jen Psaki shut down another line of dopey questioning from Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy, who claimed — falsely — that Joe Biden had previously spoken out against travel restrictions tied to COVID-19, despite his administration having recently imposed such restrictions in connection to the omicron variant of the virus. In fact, Biden had been critical of then-President Trump’s approach to handling COVID-19 of making the whole situation a spectacle of racism, to the point of stubbornly referring to the pathogen as the “China virus.”
As Doocy initially put it:
‘Before Joe Biden was president, he said that COVID travel restrictions on foreign countries were hysterical xenophobia and fearmongering. So what changed?’
.@POTUS is using every tool at his disposal to fight inflation and lower prices — what would the GOP do?
❌ Let COVID-19 run rampant
❌ Raise cost of essentials like health care and housing
❌ Stop millions of jobs from being createdhttps://t.co/VgfPoh7bbe— Jen Psaki (@PressSec) November 29, 2021
The reality is, as CNN has explained, that it’s “not clear Biden even knew about Trump’s China travel restrictions when he called Trump xenophobic on the day the restrictions were unveiled.” Biden’s campaign stated, CNN also noted, that the comments that Doocy referenced “were not about the travel restrictions at all.” Psaki replied as follows:
‘I would say first, to put it in full context, Peter — what the president was critical of was the way that the former president put out, I believe, a xenophobic tweet, and what he called the Coronavirus and who he directed it at. The president has not been critical of travel restrictions. We have put those in place ourselves — we put them in place ourselves in the spring… He believes we should follow the advice of health and medical experts. That’s exactly what he did in putting in place these restrictions over the weekend.’
Watch Psaki’s comments below:
WH Press Sec. Psaki responds to Fox News’ Peter Doocy’s bad-faith question about travel restrictions:
“What the president was critical of was the way that the former president put out, I believe, a xenophobic tweet, and what he called the coronavirus and who he directed it at.” pic.twitter.com/O86c8GuaEg
— The Recount (@therecount) November 29, 2021
Trump has wielded Biden’s supposed opposition to the COVID-19-tied travel restrictions to try and elevate his own administration’s response to COVID-19, but no detail changes the fact that the Trump team majorly dropped the ball across the board. National advocacy for something as basic as mask-wearing was mostly absent, and the Trump administration — including Trump himself — frequently opposed basic measures to keep people safe. Asked during a recent interview whether criticism that he’s faced was meant to deflect from criticism of Trump, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said: “Of course. You have to be asleep not to figure that one out… I’m just going to do my job, and I’m going to be saving lives, and they’re going to be lying.”
As @POTUS said yesterday, we will be prepared for every scenario as it related to Omicron and the vaccines. The doctors said it will take a few weeks to understand the vaccines’ effectiveness against Omicron. We have tools to help protect us right now: vaccinations and boosters.
— Jen Psaki (@PressSec) November 30, 2021