Next Up with Mark Halperin
Why The Bidens are "Big Liars," and Joe Scarborough on His "Best Biden Ever" Moment and What He Saw
Tue, 20 May 2025
Mark Halperin breaks down Biden’s cancer diagnosis announcement and why the timing of it raises serious red flags. Mark explains the reasons why the Bidens can’t be trusted and warns that the media coverage since the announcement shows signs the press is already slipping back into the bad habit that cost them their credibility: the media’s mistaken belief that the Bidens don’t lie – even now. Plus, Joe Scarborough and Mark Halperin take their years-long private debate public for the first time on "Next Up." Scarborough details what led him to making the “best Biden ever” viral comment, and why he still believes Biden’s “bad days” didn’t mean he was incapable of governing.
Chapter 1: Why are the Bidens considered untrustworthy?
I think the reason why the table needs to be set here is because I think one of the biggest mistakes, maybe the biggest through line of all for the way Bidens have been covered is the Bidens, it is regularly said, are a good family. They're decent people.
And I'm not here to tell you they're worse than the Trumps or worse than Nixon, but I'm here to tell you that the mythology that the Bidens are good people who don't lie is not borne out by the facts, and that's increasingly front and center in sharp relief this week. We know that they didn't tell the truth about Biden, Inc. We know that.
We know the president in the debate in 2020 against Donald Trump did not tell the truth when asked about Hunter's business. I'm not here to sit in moral judgment of them. I'm not here again to tell you that Joe Biden is a bigger liar by some metrics than Donald Trump.
What I am here to tell you again is this has been a horrible mistake on the part of the media to treat the Bidens like they walk on water. Four strands right now put in sharp relief. this issue. First, the release last Friday of the audio tape of Joe Biden's conversations with Special Counsel Herr regarding the issue of whether he improperly took classified material out of the White House.
Chapter 2: What are the implications of Biden's cancer diagnosis timing?
That audio was blocked from release by the Biden White House. They've made up reasons why they blocked it, but the reason that they blocked it was because it would have been politically devastating had it been released when he was still trying to run for president.
The second strand is all these questions about his mental acuity tied to the new book out today by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson related to the degree to which Joe Biden declined and the degree to which people around Joe Biden covered it up. Now I've said before, I don't think the book actually delivers on the question of
who covered up what, they hint at it, but I don't think they fully deliver on it, but there's no doubt that they are saying belatedly, in the case of Jake Tapper, less belatedly in the case of Alex Thompson, what was obvious to all, and I'll talk about that Then we've got the diagnosis announced conveniently by the Bidens.
I feel horrible for the president and his family to go through another case of cancer after they lost Beau to cancer. But the question of the timing, which even Biden loyalists have said to me, doesn't make sense to say that the president was suddenly diagnosed on Friday and announced halfway through the release from the time that her tapes were released until the release of the book.
So we'll talk about that. The last strand is how Democrats in the media are grappling with their role in trying to stop Donald Trump from getting elected president by covering up and refusing to report honestly on Joe Biden's decline. So we're gonna talk about all that.
I'll talk about that with Joe, but I wanna set the table by talking again about some of my experiences and how I have thought about Joe Biden's mental decline over the course of covering him. I've known him for a long time. He was good friends with my father, colleagues with my father.
I covered his presidential campaign in 2008, spent a lot of time around him when he was a senator, and then some time around him when he was vice president, and had a pretty good relationship with his son Beau, spent some time with him. The Bidens are big liars.
You can deny it, you can say, oh, they're such good people, but the press has assumed for years that the Bidens were somehow different, that Joe Biden was a good man, in the words of George W. Bush. Again, you just look at the way they covered up Biden Inc., the way they dealt with the coverup of his mental decline.
I'm not saying they're worse than others, but I'm saying the press has made a mistake in covering them like they're the same. I've talked here and elsewhere before about how I saw Joe Biden at a book event in 2017 on the island of Nantucket where he spoke to several hundred people with a friendly interviewer and
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Chapter 3: What evidence supports claims about Biden's mental acuity?
He was exactly the way he was later in his presidency, glassy-eyed, trailing off thoughts, losing the train of thought of the conversation, speaking kind of too long and off topic. And I said after that event, again, I've told you this before, thank goodness he's out of public life. Thank goodness he'll never have to run for anything again. And yet, of course, he did.
He ran for president twice after that. In 2021, after he got elected president, early in his administration, he gave a press conference. And during the press conference, I had an email exchange with a prominent Democrat, someone who'd served in senior positions in the Democratic Party, about what was going on in the press conference.
and the other person initiated the email exchange and he said, isn't it great to have a president who's so on top of it, who can speak so fluidly after Donald Trump? And there's no doubt if you watch the whole press conference in 21 in the spring, there's no doubt that Joe Biden looks much more with it than he would look just a few years later in the presidency.
But I wanna show you a portion of this press conference, this is 102, watch Joe Biden reading
And if we leave, we're going to do so in a safe and orderly way. We're in consultation, I said, with our allies and partners on how to proceed. And Secretary Blinken is meeting in Brussels this week with our NATO allies, particularly those who have forces there. And General Austin just met with Kayani, and I'm waiting for the briefing on that. He is the leader, quote, in Afghanistan and Kabul.
And there's a U.N.-led process that's beginning shortly on how to mechanically get people, how to end this war. But it is not my intention to stay there for a long time.
Now, presidents use notes, presidents use teleprompter, but unlike the person I was emailing with who was so favorably disposed towards Biden's performance, I was struck by the fact that he was reading a script on a topic that he had worked on for decades.
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Chapter 4: How has the media's coverage affected Biden's credibility?
And so I'm gonna read to you the parts of the email that I wrote to this person in our exchange back and forth, because it gives you into a window of how I saw Joe Biden and his presidency and his mental acuity in March of 2021. I'm reading my own email here. His mental decline is pronounced troubling and in danger of accelerating in a hurry.
It is a tough situation for his family and the country, but his widespread attempt to deny that it exists freaks some of us out. When he has naps and long overnight sleep and notes, he can make or fake his way through meetings and interviews, which is great. It means that he is often performing well enough to be president. But even his worst moments, they're scary and cautionary.
Can they have him rest his way through the ability to do the job for four years? Based on my anecdotal experience, they cannot.
When someday someone reveals the extraordinary stage managing of his daily life and public schedule that Jill has done for three years, you will send me an email and express your amazement that one, I knew, two, no one leaked this, three, no one reported it, four, they let Joe run. Until then, let's hope for the best for America.
I live in New York City and I'm a reporter and I've been a reporter for a long time, I have plenty of sources, but I'm not the only reporter who could have and should have seen this and had it inform the way they covered the Joe Biden presidency and Joe Biden. I said things like this publicly, I don't think I only was putting it in a private email, but it's extraordinary how far
from that point of view, based on reporting, not hostility to Joe Biden, not rumors, how far that reporting, how far other people's reporting on Joe Biden was from that point of view, that informed point of view about what was happening. And what I lay out in the email is exactly what happened and is now being belatedly reported by others. Huge failure on the part of the media.
And the tragedy of it is most reporters who covered the White House for places like the Washington Post and the New York Times knew almost everything I had in that email. Maybe not in 2021, but sitting in the White House, they saw it every day. And yet through some combination of being intimidated by the Biden aides who threatened people, who said things like that in public,
and a desire to help Donald Trump lose the election to make sure Biden won, they didn't say these things. It did not inform their coverage. It did inform the coverage of people in conservative media who were mocked and derided as being part of some machine to destroy Joe Biden. I'm gonna give you one example. Greg Kelly, who's a friend of mine, anchor at Newsmax, Greg reported this early on.
regularly and if you go back and watch the totality of greg's coverage we'll see occasionally a little bit over the top did he occasionally overstate the degree of joe biden's mental decline without a doubt but look at some of what greg reported over a long period of time here this is number 108.
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