Anyone living in the White House after January 20, 2025 will likely be calling their favorite ideologically affiliated cable news anchors from the Oval Office landline. Monday’s cable news lineup made it clear that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, both in their prime as campaigners, are eager to take advantage of the Phone-a-Friend benefit.
Monday’s cable news agenda began with Biden calling MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and ended with Trump calling Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Neither candidate appeared on camera while speaking to their respective home cable networks; both (to varying degrees, with Hannity faring much worse) were fed softballs. When Nixon debated Kennedy and was found unphotogenic in comparison, Kennedy exploited the difference and emphasized his relative youth; In the aftermath of the June 27 CNN debate, in which Trump emerged as a solid front-runner, both candidates appear to be trying to escape the camera.
On Fox, Trump struggled to say anything specific about Biden’s debate performance.
“He looked extremely pale, to put it nicely,” Donald Trump said Monday night on “Hannity,” his first interview since the debate — and the second of two dueling presidential news calls on Monday. “Maybe it was a good make-up job, or maybe it wasn’t, but he looked pale.”
Trump seemed to have won the debate by default: just by showing up and speaking relatively clear and complete sentences, he had outdone—on style, not substance—the incumbent president, who had shown up and done little else . In the intervening days, Trump has largely stayed out of the spotlight; this was his first interview since the debate.
And it seemed clear that Trump has also lost a step; his ability to sidetrack himself has perhaps never felt more pronounced than when Sean Hannity asked him an exaggerated question about his impressions of debate night and Trump began describing how special and important it felt to be at CNN headquarters to be. (He has always been enchanted by television, but at times he has known he has a little more message.) And his energy in delivering an anti-Biden screed about the likelihood of World War III overseen by the sitting president seemed lukewarm to non-existent. – it was a low-energy speech, just as Trump has inherited the wind. Maybe it’s more fun for him to run from behind.
Not that he’s ever admitted to losing an election. And that may be the only thing he shares with his opponent. Biden’s interview Monday on MSNBC was safer ground than his interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on July 5; Biden used it to berate not only his opponent, but also his own party.
On ‘Morning Joe,’ Biden found himself in relatively comfortable territory — while host Joe Scarborough is among those who have urged the President to consider this When he withdrew from the election, he and co-host (and wife) Mika Brzezinski were generally staunch Biden supporters throughout his time in office. And the broadcasters provided largely muted sounding boards for a barrage of words from Biden, an anguished and often bitterly sarcastic tirade in which Biden vowed to keep fighting not just Trump but Democrats as well, at one point declaring, “I’m so frustrated by the elites in the party.” In a bitingly sarcastic tone he added, “They know so much more.” Late in the interview, as if to answer the question of what caused the sound of rustling paper at his end, Biden announced that he was reading his answers from a list.
Both hosts, especially Brzezinski, asked real questions of the president (Brzezinski in particular pressed him on whether he had undergone a neurological exam after the debate, to which the answer was a long-winded and confusing “No”). And this set them apart from Hannity. But no fundamentally sympathetic interviewer can resist the power of a president, no matter how worn-out the president may be: Both Scarborough and Brzezinski were ultimately overwhelmed by both the president’s willingness to pass them by and his indignant tone, calling out elites who were not on the phone, but out there, waiting to be proven wrong.
It was a performance reminiscent of Trump — not the Trump who enlisted Hannity to throw caution to the wind, knowing he was ahead of the curve and willing to play the hits for 20 minutes. The insurgent Trump of 2016. The one whose content did not resemble Biden’s, but whose style the Democrats could not tolerate either. If only Biden could subject himself to an interview that wasn’t so obviously reminiscent of Trump’s lazy-man style of telephone campaigning, contacting the cable news show that clearly aligned with his perspective and was most willing to keep the tape running , shouldn’t he have done that?
After all, Trump’s “Hannity” phone caller is nothing new. During the 2016 campaign’s audio-only cable news broadcasts, including calls to “Fox & Friends,” Trump established a cult-like hold on his party by insisting, in contradiction to reality, that “I alone” would win the race can win. There was perhaps a Wizard of Oz quality to his supporters – over the phone and with hidden images, Trump created his own reality in which they could participate.
Whoever is advising Biden has decided to go from the same playbook. It’s ugly to the point of heartbreaking – the Democrats’ line so far has been that they exist on a higher level than Trump, and here’s their standard-bearer jumping on the phone to rail against the elites, to decry polls and news organizations as fake and unreliable, positioning itself as the sole holder of special insight. And if these points sound false, the director simply repeats them again, louder.
However, an important difference could lie in the specific value propositions of these politicians. When Trump ran against his own party, he had a claim as an outsider, as a breath of fresh air, as an agent of change (and even chaos). Biden, first elected to the Senate under President Nixon and otherwise the incumbent president since 2021, cannot credibly go against the establishment of which he is a part – if he does, he resembles a man shouting at the wind as it changes direction. .
The best thing you can say about Biden’s MSNBC appearance is that he pretended to answer or outright ignored the hosts’ questions; that they were questions at all gave the interview more integrity than the questions Biden fielded this weekend. Appears on two radio programs aimed at black audiences – and in one of them: calling himself “the first black woman” vice president – Biden’s team had made sure he wouldn’t encounter any friction. The hosts claimed they had been given a short list of pre-approved questions. (The Biden campaign has said that accepting the questions was not a condition.)
Only he knows what awaits Biden. Pressure from his party to resign will likely increase. And that pressure seems to presuppose something that Biden cannot concede — that in an election against a candidate engineered by reality television and catalyzed by Fox News, he simply can no longer compete in getting his message across. And relying on MSNBC to air it for him only goes so far. On Fox News, Trump was just coasting. But for Biden, this “Morning Joe” performance, as evidenced by the past two weeks, seems like the very best thing he could do right now.