White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre abruptly ended a phone interview with a North Carolina radio show host after he asked if President Joe Biden has dementia.
In a roughly six-minute interview that aired on WBT Charlotte’s News Talk on Tuesday, Jean-Pierre spoke with the station’s news director, Mark Garrison, who opened up the conversation with questions on the Democratic president’s mental capacity. Biden, 81, is the oldest sitting president in U.S. history, and questions about his ability to serve another four years has sparked concerns from Republicans and some members of his own party ahead of November’s election. Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, will turn 78 in June.
Garrison told Jean-Pierre that he had “a number of people” plead with him to ask if the president has dementia, to which the Biden official responded, “Mark, I can’t even believe you’re asking me this question. That is an incredibly offensive question to ask.”
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“Let me be very clear about this,” Jean-Pierre continued. “For the past several years, the president’s physician has laid out in a comprehensive way the president’s health. This is a president if you watch him every day, if you really pay attention to his record of what he has done, you will see exactly how focused he has been on the American people, how historic his actions have been.
“And so I’m not even going to truly, truly, really, you know, take the premise of your question,” she continued. “I think it is incredibly insulting. And and so we can, you know, we can move on to the next question.”
Garrison pivoted the conversation to questions about the cost of living, asking how Biden plans to “win votes when people don’t have as much disposable income.”
Jean-Pierre told the host that Biden “understands,” adding that the president walked into “multiple crises” when he first entered the White House due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Trump’s policies. Before Garrison can ask another question, Jean-Pierre ended the conversation with, “Thank you so much, Mark. Have an amazing day,” and hung up the phone.
Newsweek reached out to the White House press team via email for further comment on Tuesday.
Recent polling by MaristPoll shows that nearly 60 percent of North Carolina adults, including over a quarter of Democratic voters, think that the president’s “mental fitness is a real concern” in November. Respondents were more split on questions regarding Trump’s mental capacity, with 48 percent of the 1,197 respondents saying that the former president’s mental ability was a real concern.
Questions have also swirled over Trump’s ability to serve in the White House again. Leading psychiatrist and retired Harvard Medical School professor Lance Dodes recently said that the former president “repeatedly shows” signs of dementia at his age, including “confusion about reality.”
New York psychologist Suzanne Lachmann also observed signs of dementia in Trump, including when he would “seemingly forget how the sentence began and invent something in the middle,” resulting in “an incomprehensible word salad.”
Biden addressed questions about his age during his State of the Union address earlier this month, saying that the “issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are, it’s how old our ideas are.”
“Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are among the oldest of ideas,” he added. “And you can’t lead America with ancient ideas that only take us back.”
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.