President Trump may claim he loathes the media, but in reality, he obsessively craves constant coverage by the press as much as they need him. For all the tough talk about “fake news,” Trump is about as accessible to the press as any president we’ve had in generations, taking near-daily press conferences and sitting for blistering interviews from Axios’s Jonathan Swan and Fox News’s Chris Wallace.
The media may have come around to backing Joe Biden wholeheartedly, but the former vice president is showing them no love. Biden’s team has repeatedly rejected interview requests from Wallace. But it’s not just a blanket boycott of Fox News. Neither Biden nor running mate Kamala Harris go on the Sunday shows or sit down for any hard-hitting, in-person interviews. Same story with regard to publicly aired press conference questions.
But on the morning of the first day of the Democratic National Convention, a new Biden interview by Cardi B has been published by Elle magazine.
Cardi B (the rapper who was famously not canceled after admitting that she used to drug and rob men to subsidize her income in her former life as a stripper) supported Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, appearing in a campaign spot for the socialist. But now, continuing the cringeworthy trend of women’s media outsourcing journalism to celebrities, Cardi B was charged with interviewing Biden while also endorsing him.
Unsurprisingly, the interview wasn’t much of an interview at all. The transcript actually begins with Biden asking Cardi B about her own electoral priorities. Cardi B later follows up with hard-hitting questions along the lines of: “Sometimes people have problems in their community. For example, a lot of after-school programs that I [had] growing up, [are] no more in my hood. Why is that?”
Another heavy hitter: “Sometimes, when my taxes come in, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m depressed, oh Lord, let me see my Birkin collection.’ That is a little joke. [But] when you see the taxes coming off your check, you don’t understand, because you feel like you’re putting in so many hours. People want to know, can you provide college education, this [healthcare] plan, without a big chunk of taxes coming out of our checks?”
The whole production would be no more quirky than Trump sitting down with Barstool boss Dave Portnoy if Biden were actually subjecting himself to real reporters. But he’s not. Instead, he’s letting the media act as an opposition team to Trump while Biden remains bunkered in his basement.
Trump might wrongly call the press the enemy of the people, but he’s happy to sit down for questioning despite knowing that most of the media is actively rooting against him. Biden refuses to do so precisely because he knows that the partisan press will let him get away with it.
