Well, here’s an interesting revelation from the host of “Morning Joe,” the eponymous former GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough of Florida: He’s never watched the most infamous clip of himself.
That was just one of the takeaways from a truly cringeworthy interview between the MSNBC host and political journalist Mark Halperin, which aired Tuesday, in which Scarborough was forced to explain why, in March 2024, he told the world that after talking with the president for hours, “This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.”
For those of you who have forgotten:
FLASHBACK: When Joe Scarborough strongly defended Biden, declaring, “F-you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.” pic.twitter.com/guCxCHG3Ey
— Resist the Mainstream (@ResisttheMS) April 4, 2025
“I’ve said it for years now, he’s cogent. But I undersold it when I said he was cogent, he’s far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been, intellectually, analytically, because he’s been around for 50 years,” Scarborough said. “Start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And f-you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.”
Three months later, we saw “this version of Biden” and how “cogent” he was, and it looked like this:
Needless to say, the drugs didn’t work. pic.twitter.com/3lYHnU476w
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 28, 2024
So, on the same day that the Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson book, which details how that version of Joe Biden very much wasn’t the best Biden ever — and how the White House covered up that he was essentially unfit to be president — and two days after Biden revealed he had a type of cancer that was at a stage which meant he almost certainly had it for most of his presidency — Scarborough was talking about how he’d never seen this infamous clip of himself, even though his friend Halperin had told him it had effectively become the symbol of the media’s willful blindness about Biden’s condition.
Did Scarborough know he was lying to the American people?
How to explain this? Well, first off, Scarborough describes a nighttime phone call with the then-president in 2022 about Ukraine after he had said Biden should stop telling Vladimir Putin what the United States wouldn’t do regarding Ukraine and instead focus on what we would do or just shut up. Biden’s “analysis,” he said, was so on-point that he was convinced.
“In fact, when I finished talking to Biden … I hung up the phone and said to Mika [Brzezinski, his co-host and wife], ‘Wow, he doesn’t have dementia! Whoa!’ Because it was not just cogent, it was a better, really, analysis of the situation than I’d heard from most people.”
He said that there were “other calls” and his talks with those around the president that convinced him that there was nothing going on with the president’s cognition.
Halperin, a fraud in his own right, went on to push back, however — noting that “you saw him address a dead congresswoman,” among other things.
“Jackie, where’s Jackie?,” Joe Biden says about Rep. Jackie Walorski who died in a car accident a few months ago. pic.twitter.com/khdiesmEsx
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 28, 2022
And then he showed Scarborough the clip, which — I mean, as someone who feeds off of schadenfreude like a caffeine junkie feeds off coffee, it’s a truly fantastic way to start your morning if you want to fast forward to the 6:00 mark and watch it happen:
“Put into proper context, I’m just not going to freak out and melt down on one or two clips here and there.”@JoeNBC stands by his “best Biden ever” comment – preview clip from his interview with @MarkHalperin, out today on @NextUpHalperin.
Subscribe NOW:… pic.twitter.com/7Fs7xW4DzX
— Next Up with Mark Halperin (@NextUpHalperin) May 20, 2025
But, after the self-incredulity, “Morning Joe” had his excuses.
“He stumbled and bumbled around, Mark. I mean, yeah, he certainly did,” Scarborough said, before moving on to whose mental state really matters.
“Donald Trump did; other politicians did, and it’s actually the same case as a lot of times when I’ve gone in and talked to Donald Trump,” he said. “We go on 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, a better understanding of where Donald Trump is mentally, if Donald Trump is losing it, like people have said through the years or not.”
“And so again, am I going to look at a clip that’s gone viral 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,” Scarborough continued. “Are some of the clips bad? Yeah, they certainly are bad.”
“Put into proper context, I’m just not going to freak out and melt down on one or two clips here and there,” he continued. “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 Joe Biden being able to analyze the most important issues.”
Until, of course, the point where it did — where everybody who watched a certain debate and the fallout from it could see it.
Scarborough has an estimated annual salary of $8 million, and he’s not getting it just because he’s a friendly face to wake up to in the morning, like the preternaturally cheerful mannequins that populate most broadcast network morning shows. Even on CNN and Fox News, there’s less abrasive fare in the early a.m. No, he’s there because he’s supposed to be the consummate Washington intelligencer. He was a representative from 1995 until 2001 and has sold himself, as a media personality, as a guy who can not only comport himself well on air but get the pulse of the Beltway from the People Who Know.
If he wants to point out that everybody from left-leaning media was fooled, fine. Everybody was fooled because everybody wanted to be fooled; he doesn’t have to say that about himself; we can reasonably intuit it. But to Biden-splain his decision to so vehemently avouch for his cognitive excellence from a few phone calls and his Capitol Hill insider bona fides, only to be proved wrong in the most embarrassing of ways just a few months later? He’s either stupid or believes that you are.
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