Morning Joe Opens With Damning Axios and Politico Reports of Democratic Fury At Biden

Morning Joe opened Wednesday’s show with damning reports from Axios and Politico profiling the off-the-record fury of elected Democrats and party donors at President Joe Biden’s debate performance in a strong pivot from Monday’s all-in Biden promotion from host Mika Brzezinski.

The pivot is particularly notable as a statement that will run straight to the White House given that Biden is a frequent viewer and close to the show’s main hosts, Brzezinski and co-host Joe Scarborough. Axios reported in February that Biden ensures his top aides tune in to the show, with the president himself often seeking insights from Scarborough and other regular contributors on policy.

Co-host Willie Geist began in an interview with Politico White House correspondent Eli Stokols, who discussed his coverage of the “understandable” and palpable “frustration and finger pointing” being leveled at “five or six very senior aides” who are being blamed for “cloistering the president.”

Stokols said: “You have the same people cutting the ads, the same people figuring out how they’re going to deploy the president, and the same principle who, despite their very up close knowledge and seeing the president every day and realizing his limitations, they came up with this rationale for him to run anyway – that he’s the only person who has ever beaten Donald Trump and he has to be the candidate again.”

He added: “Now the view across the party, at least among the people we talked to, is that seems to be a pretty self-serving and maybe delusional case for another four years.”

Geist repeated the claim, pushed by the White House and by Brzezinski in Monday’s 15-minute Morning Joe opening monologue, that Biden had had a full travel schedule ahead of the debate. He countered, however, that Biden had been home for 11 days and “resting at Camp David for a week before the debate took place, which reinforces the point.”

Stokols agreed: “Well, they keep kind of adjusting the argument, which is a tell in and of itself… the discrepancies here, the changing picture, none of this is reassuring Democrats who are concerned about the sustainability of Biden’s candidacy.

He continued: “Even though this is obviously damage control, an effort to keep the trains on track at a very difficult moment, it’s also a huge shift for this White House that for three and half years, up until this point, insisted nothing was wrong and even a suggestion the president had aged or lost a step, which now the White House is being explicit about to explain away the debate… that was dismissed out of hand. Reporters were attacked for writing it… All of those things, so much frustration and defensiveness and dismissiveness… now suddenly they’re here acknowledging the obvious.”

Brzezinski, whose loyalty to Biden has been repeated through the week, interrupted to offer a brief caveat to any viewers, simply saying: “He’s 81.”

Still excuses couldn’t stop the landslide of opposing sentiment as the following segment featured Axios’ journalist Jim VandeHei, whose Wednesday morning article with executive editor Mike Allen examined Democrat “rage” at Biden.

Brzezinski introduced VandeHei, who began: “We’ve talked to dozens of House members, most of whom aren’t going to go on the record yet. The ones who will go on the record already have. They’re furious. They’re just not buying it.”

He continued: “Now I would say they’re madder about the response to the debate than the debate itself. They can’t believe he’s deflecting and saying it’s much ado about nothing. They can’t believe he’s blaming staff for it. Now this idea of an 11-day jet lag would cause you to have a poor debate performance strikes them as a crazy explanation for it.”

He added: “If you’re a member of Congress, to be honest, all you care about is your voters first and your donors second. Yeah, you like the president if he helps you, but if he doesn’t, you will turn on him because you care about self-preservation. So they’re talking to donors. Donors are furious. Voters are telling them what Lloyd Doggett’s voters are telling him, which is we want him to step aside. That’s why yesterday we talked to several people who were on multiple calls with a lot of members, and when there was a show of hands or, hey, should he stay in, almost nobody said he should stay in.”

Watch above on MSNBC.

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