During a State Department briefing on Tuesday, an Associated Press reporter called out the Department spokesperson, Ned Price, for not being prepared and downplaying policy changes from the Trump administration.
The AP reporter said that “[the Biden] administration inherited plenty from the previous administration that it absolutely reversed.” He then asked Price if the Biden administration is saying it is “not confident” in their “negotiating skills,” in addition to if they “couldn’t have renegotiated a deal with the Taliban” and if Biden “didn’t want to take troops out” out of Afghanistan.
Price tried playing off the reporter’s questions, saying he must be confused and that he is comparing “apples and oranges.” He admittedly said the Biden administration has “changed quite a few U.S. policies across a number of fronts” since the Trump administration.
By playing off the reporter’s questions, he said, the reporter “would be hard-pressed to find an international agreement that the United States signed on to during the [Trump administration] that this administration has jettisoned, done away with.”
The reporter had cut off Price to ask about “Geneva protocol on the anti-abortion stuff” in addition to the “agreements with the Northern Triangle, with Mexico and the Northern Triangle.”
Price kept trying to downplay the reporter’s comments by saying, “the point that [the Biden administration] have made on any number of steps about the importance of the durability of American foreign policies – American foreign policy across administrations.”
The reporter said the agreements he mentioned are “international agreements that [the Biden administration] jettisoned.”
“You just challenged me to come up with an international agreement that the [Trump] administration signed that [the Biden administration] have walked away from, and I just gave you, I think, three,” the reporter added.
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