Next Up with Mark Halperin
Why The Bidens are "Big Liars," and Joe Scarborough on His "Best Biden Ever" Moment and What He Saw
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.
Full Episode
Thank you for coming back, everybody. For more NextUp, I'm Mark Halperin, editor-in-chief of Two Way. Very glad to have you here and very excited about our conversation today. One of my close friends, Joe Scarborough and I, who have known each other a long time and talk regularly.
People who work in politics and in media are regularly surrounded by people in their lives who they talk to on a regular basis. Joe and I talk and communicate quite a bit. And we talk about sports, we talk about music, we talk about our families, we talk about all sorts of stuff. But one topic that we've talked about now for seven or eight years is Joe Biden and the status of his mental acuity.
And we have honest conversations about it. We're not dogmatic. We don't say it's weekend at Bernie's and Barack Obama was secretly running the government. And we don't say that everything's fine with Joe Biden. What we do is agree or disagree by following the data. And I'm super excited for you to be able to hear the kind of conversation that Joe and I have regularly.
Normally it's not on video and audio recorded. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you. Looking forward for you to hear the kind of conversation Joe and I have had. And it's on a topic that is very timely right now, because of course, although Donald Trump is president, Joe Biden this week again is very much in the news.
I'll say again, for Democrats and the media to have the credibility to hold Donald Trump accountable, there has to be a reckoning about what's happened. And the through line is the question of how Joe Biden has been covered.
I will continue to aggressively cover Donald Trump and his administration, and I'll continue to say what is obviously the case, which is Donald Trump frequently does not tell the truth.
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.
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