MSNBC host Joe Scarborough admits he was wrong about Biden

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Joe Scarborough admitted he was “obviously wrong” about comments he made a year ago maintaining that Joe Biden was at his “best” before  the U.S. president ended his re-election bid.

The MSNBC host on Wednesday spoke on Morning Joe about seeing Biden in Ireland in 2023. His guests were CNN’s Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios, who were discussing their book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.

Scarborough noted the president did several events and sat down for an interview with him.

“He’s doing well, he has a hero’s reception in Ireland,” Scarborough said. “I’ve told you about going in and talking to him for two and a half, three hours inside the White House, far beyond cogent. Really, really has a better, well, has a grasp of international politics in a way that only somebody who’s been doing it since he was 29 years old.

“We get phone calls at home where the guy is like pounding me because of op-eds that I wrote, etcetera, etcetera. So, I said that this was Biden at his best. That’s what I saw. That’s what other people saw. I was obviously wrong, so I’m not sure what my takeaway is here, the next time.”

Scarborough explained that after spending hours and hours around Biden, he wanted to know what Tapper learned from his sources.

“I saw what everybody else saw, the stumbles in front of the camera,” Tapper said, adding the last time he saw Biden in person was at the State of the Union luncheon with news anchors in 2023.

“There were more moments of non-functioning Biden behind the scenes than we were privy to, than what we saw,” the CNN host added.

However, a day earlier, Scarborough appeared on Next Up With Mark Halperin and stood by last year’s claim.

He explained that he had written an opinion piece about the Ukraine war stating that Biden should tell Russian President Vladimir Putin what America was going to do instead of what the country wasn’t going to do.

Biden called him and they chatted for more than half an hour. Scarborough said the then-president clearly explained his tactics.

“When I finished talking to Biden, I guess in late ’22, I hung up the phone and I said to (wife) Mika (Brzezinski), ‘He doesn’t have dementia.’ It was not just cogent, it was a better analysis of the situation than I’d heard from most people.”

But Scarborough maintained his defence of Biden on Wednesday, arguing that any missteps the president made didn’t hinder his ability to govern.

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“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 said.

“Are some of the clips bad? Yeah, they certainly are bad.”

He added that certain factors helped assess Biden’s fitness to lead the country.

“Put into proper context, I’m just not going to freak out and melt down on one or two clips here and there,” Scarborough said.

“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.”