During Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “New Day,” anchor Jake Tapper contrasted his interviews with Joe Biden and Donald Trump.”
Tapper said, “First of all, as Daniel Dale has said, you know President-elect Biden says things that aren’t true, but in terms of the speed and the brazenness of the falsehoods, nothing compares to outgoing President Trump. It’s just as a factual matter. Especially these days, with the craziness he’s saying about the election, I mean just bizarreness from a different planet.”
Discussing his interview last night with Biden, Tapper said, “I didn’t really have to steel myself for it because even if I knew—if he didn’t like the question—I knew he was going to behave like a rational adult. Maybe the worst that might happen is he might, you know, get his Irish up a little bit as they say, but I didn’t have to prepare for, like, a full-blown emotionally abusive session, which I think a lot of people who interview President Trump have to deal with.”
He added, “I think what was enjoyable as a journalist was, look, we all got into this business so that we could cover policy debates and discussions about issues that affect people’s lives. We didn’t get into this business to fact check or to call out racism or indecency. That’s not why we’re journalists, it’s what we spent a lot of time doing over the last four or five years, but it’s not why we got into the business. So there was just a certain kind of — pleasure is not the right word for it, but I like covering substance. I like covering policy. I like asking about the COVID relief package. Do you support this compromise or not? And that’s honestly, that’s something that outgoing President Trump isn’t particularly good at in terms of substance, he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about a lot of times.”
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