Friday not only marks President Joe Biden’s lowest approval rating — he has also gone exactly 100 days without doing a sit-down press interview.
The president, whom only 39 percent of U.S. adults approve of, last sat down with the press on February 10, 2022, when he spoke to NBC’s Lester Holt ahead of the Super Bowl, according to Republican National Committee (RNC) analysis. While Biden has held press conferences and engaged with individual reporters, the White House seems less inclined to grant more probing, long-form interviews that would give time for Biden to further explain the work of his administration.
So far, Biden has given 23 interviews — a number significantly lower than his predecessors. According to the White House Transitions Project, which measured six Presidents and their interchanges with reporters from Inauguration Day to April 29 of the second year, former President Donald Trump had given 95 interviews by this point in his presidency and former President Barack Obama had given 187.
While Biden has hidden from one-on-one scrutiny, a trend that has even been criticized by corporate media, Vice President Kamala Harris has soaked up the limelight, doing 88 interviews in that same timeframe. First Lady Jill Biden has done at least 22 interviews.
In a statement to Breitbart News, RNC spokeswoman Emma Vaughn slammed Biden for shying away from sit-down press interviews as “another pitiful mark on Biden’s long list of failures.”
“Joe Biden promised to have the most transparent administration in history, another blatant lie to the American people,” Vaughn said. “100 days without a press interview underscores how little Biden cares to answer for struggling Americans seeking solutions to the crises he created. This Milestone is yet another pitiful mark on Biden’s long list of failures.”
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Research poll released on Friday reflected Vaughn’s sentiment, showing that only “about 2 in 10 adults say the U.S. is heading in the right direction, or the economy is good, both down from about 3 in 10 a month earlier.”
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Twitter.