“Biden calls on a specific reporter, gets a question, then reads the answer off a card. In other words, he knows the question, then reads the answer. What is going on here?”
2024 GOP frontrunner Donald Trump criticized Joe Biden on Wednesday, calling out the president’s preplanned lists of reporters to call on at press conferences and the answers he reads out in response.
"Biden calls on a specific reporter, gets a question, then reads the answer off a card. In other words, he knows the question, then reads the answer. What is going on here," Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Biden has repeatedly been caught with cheat sheets at press conferences, and regularly calls on specific reporters from a list.
In April, it was revealed that Biden’s press conference notes had included not just the names of reporters he was supposed to call on, but their questions as well.
The sheet for a joint press conference with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in Washington, DC was revealed to have a hand-written note above Los Angeles Times reporter Courtney Subramanian's name and picture informing Biden that she would be asking "Question #1."
The text of Subramanian's first question, "How are YOU squaring YOUR domestic priorities — like reshoring semiconductors manufacturing — with alliance-based foreign policy?" can clearly be seen underneath the heading, "Foreign Policy / Semiconductor Manufacturing."
Subramanian was in fact the first person he called on, and while the question’s wording differed, the subject was still the same.
In both 2021 and 2022, he was spotted with a notecard depicting journalists' names and faces, as well as instructions on how and when to sit down.
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