Minutes after Joe Biden announced his candidacy for the 2020 presidential nomination, Fox & Friends glumly assessed that the Democratic frontrunner’s strategy “might actually be a winning message.”
Co-host Ainsley Earhardt contrasted Biden’s stinging announcement video—a fierce attack on Fox & Friends fan President Trump and his shameful comments after the deadly Charlotteville neo-Nazi protests—with the blowback Sen. Bernie Sanders received Wednesday night at the She the People presidential forum in Houston. When the Vermont senator was asked at the event about the rise of white nationalism in America, he defaulted to his usual talking points about immigration reform and mentioned his attendance at the March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King. The audience booed him and someone yelled “we know!”
“There were moans and groans because they say he was dodging the question,” Earhardt said Thursday morning.
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“When you see Joe Biden making that plea, just anti-racism, anti-white supremacy, it might actually be a winning message.”
Earhardt did, however, lament that Biden’s announcement video “aggressively” attacked Trump for his post-Charlottesville violence comments.
“If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation,” Biden said in his announcement video. “And I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
“We saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open. Their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging and baring the fangs of racism, chanting the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ’30s,” he added.
“That’s when we heard the words of the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation,” continued Biden. “He said there were quote some ‘very fine people on both sides.’ Very fine people on both sides?”
The folks on the Fox & Friends couch weren’t fans of Biden’s harsh tone.
“I was thinking when he announced it was going to be cheerful music, and pomp and circumstance, and proud to be an American and American flags. It was a different tone,” Earhardt said.
Guest co-host Ed Henry added: “Usually you get in and want to reflect that optimistic tone and tell us—tell the American people what is your vision for America.”
“I got it that there’s a resist movement in this country that wants to take out Donald Trump over everything basically, especially something like Charlottesville,” Henry continued. “If you think that’s a moment that you want to highlight, it seems to me that could be part of the video. But it seems it turned out to be a dominant part of the video, and the music is somber. It’s very downbeat, downcast, tear the president down. And less about what you would do differently.”
