President Biden snapped at a reporter on Monday in the Oval Office for asking him a question that he wasn’t prepared for.
With Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi joining Biden at the White House NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell asked the President to comment on Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough’s decision that front-line VA workers would be required to get a coronavirus vaccine. That’s when he lost it.
“You are such a pain in the neck, but I’m going to answer your question because we’ve known each other for so long,” he said. “It has nothing to do with Iraq … I’ll answer your question. Yes, Veteran Affairs is going to, in fact, require that all doctors working in their facilities are going to have to be vaccinated.”
O’Donnell said she took his comments as a “compliment” as Biden chuckled. Biden announced the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq on Monday.
Biden was genial with O’Donnell, but he has lashed out in the past at reporters over questions he finds unfair or unfounded. Last month, he snapped at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for a question about Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling her she was in the “wrong business” at one point, and he also had sharp replies on the subject of his son Hunter Biden throughout 2020.
One member of the media has a theory as to why Biden and other Dems have such a hard time responding to hard questions.
One White House reporter anonymously told journalist Julia Ioffe earlier this month that Democrats generally expect the media to take their side and are more “thin-skinned” than Republicans as a result.
“This is not unique to Trump but Republicans never expect a fair shake, so if you cover them fairly, you can have a good working relationship with them,” the reporter said. “Democrats de facto expect you to be on their side and are horrified when you hold them to account as you would any other administration.”
Biden has received a lot of criticism since taking office for appearing to have scripted answers and staging questions to be on his topic of choice. Lately, he’s been looser with his words, such as when he let it slip that Facebook was “killing people” by allowing the spread of misleading information about the coronavirus vaccine.
