Hi, I’m George Gerbo and welcome to Washington Times Weekly, where we get a chance to sit down with our reporters and talk about their latest coverage of news and events.
Joining me on this edition is esteemed Washington Times National Politics reporter Seth McLaughlin.
[GERBO] Let’s dive in first with what is becoming a trend among Democrats that are continuing to distance themselves from the party and former President Biden. Karine Jean-Pierre, the former White House press secretary, said that she’s now going to become an Independent as well as launching a new book that will be published in the fall. But you’ve written about Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and ambassador in the Biden administration, who says he’s starting to have some doubts, and start to put forth some of his misgivings and some of the holdups that the Biden administration had during his time serving in the administration.
[McLAUGHLIN] There’s sort of two separate tracks here, right? With Karine Jean-Pierre, it kind of seems like a cash grab to me after you’ve been sitting there defending Biden and basically smacking down anyone in the media who had questioned his mental capabilities for months and months and months from the White House podium.
On the flip side, with Rahm Emanuel and other Democrats, “distance yourself from Biden” is sort of becoming this early 2028 potential candidate litmus test. In some way, shape, or form, they feel like they have to assure voters that they either didn’t know anything about Biden, they were totally blindsided by it, or come up with some explanation that eases the clear concerns that voters had as to why Democrats tried to foist Biden upon the country for another four-year term before eventually pulling the plug after his disastrous debate against Trump in Atlanta.
So, Rahm was on a podcast with Tim Miller, a long-time GOP strategist — I believe he’s an independent now, left the party over Trump. But Tim was kind of grilling Rahm on why he didn’t step up and do more to tell Biden’s inner circle that they need to basically give him the boot… or, it’s time to move on and start shifting the focus towards a primary campaign rather than a reelection campaign. And Rahm said the criticism is somewhat fair, because he was serving as ambassador to Japan, and he’s 14 hours away, whatever the flight is to Tokyo. But he did say that Biden himself and the White House showed an arrogance in their unwillingness to listen to people outside their bubble and that the country is now paying a price for that.
So I think you’re going to see more and more of this, and it’s going to be interesting to see the degree to which people try to cleave themselves away from Biden and those who perhaps even try to stick up for them as they try to carve out some sort of lane and the early jockeying for position among those 2028 Democratic presidential candidates.
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