On the first morning of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, Trump campaign spokesperson Hogan Gidley went on Fox News in an attempt to reframe the race between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It didn’t go as planned.
Host Sandra Smith asked Gidley the same question Trump was asked on Fox & Friends earlier on Monday about the biggest differences between the two candidates. While the president talked about “energy,” “fracking,” and the stock market, Gidley tried to take a broader approach.
“The beauty about this campaign is you don’t have to guess how things would look under either person because they’ve both been at the top for so long,” Gidley said. “Joe Biden has a 47-year failed record in elected office with nothing to show for it, quite frankly.”
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He continued, “When he was at the helm, what we like to say is, you don’t have to guess how the economy would look, I just touched on it, it was absolutely horrible. People did not have jobs. The jobs that were being created were being created overseas.”
“You’re talking about during the Obama administration?” Smith asked, sounding a bit confused.
Gidley went on to falsely accuse Biden of saying he wants to “defund the police” (he hasn’t) and nonsensically suggest that when the former vice president “had the chance to fix a pandemic” he “just closed testing and said we’re not going to test anymore because we know it’s all over the country.” It was never made clear what he was talking about on that point.
“OK, there’s a lot to dig into there, the economy and other things,” Smith said at that point, interrupting her guest’s stream of lies. “Obviously, during the Obama administration, you have to reference the fact that you did have a significant drop in the unemployment rate coming out of the financial crisis.”
She moved on to a new CNN poll that shows a much diminished lead for Biden before Gidley could defend himself on any of his false claims. To his credit, given a chance to praise the one outlier poll that shows his boss in a competitive position, he maintained that in the end the polls will be just as “wrong” as they were in 2016.
