Jake Tapper confronts Chris Coons about Biden’s bad debate

The leadership anchor Jake Tapper grilled Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) about President Joe Biden’s The debate stalls as he repeatedly confronts him with video clips of the president and rejects Coons’ attempts to dismiss it as a bad night.

Tapper began the approximately twelve-and-a-half-minute segment on Monday afternoon by playing several excerpts from Biden’s most difficult moments from the debate, which the CNN moderator, along with his colleague Dana Bash.

“How do you explain the debate performance and moments like this?” Tapper asked Coons.

The senator responded that Tapper had shown “probably the most difficult moment of the debate” and then pivoted to attack the former president Donald Trump for “unleashing a torrent of lies, abuse and revenge.” Coons also mentioned Biden’s “powerful, clear and compelling speech” at a campaign rally in North Carolina the day after the debate.

“Everyone has a bad night,” Coons added, saying he was urging the Biden team to “calm people in the media and the public” by doing more impromptu interviews with reporters and small groups of voters, at town hall meetings, etc.

“With all due respect, it’s not — it’s not honest to say this was just one night,” Tapper said, mentioning “another moment like this, not just a senior losing the plot, but something else going on here,” and categorizing it as “some kind of glitch” when Biden tried to introduce the Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.

“I don’t know what that was,” Tapper said of the video clip.

“It doesn’t bother me at all,” Coons said, arguing that he could “find a dozen clips of me, of you, of anyone who’s on TV speaking publicly and constantly losing the thread,” before mentioning Trump’s many gaffes and odd comments, the “long passages where he talks nonsense, where he talks about whether he’d rather be electrocuted or eaten by a shark, where he says nonsensical things about burning forests or cancer-causing windmills.”

Coons noted that many members of Trump’s White House staff called him “morally unfit for the office of president” and refused to support him. In contrast, members of Biden’s Cabinet and many Democratic senators and governors supported the president.

He reiterated his recommendation to the Biden team that they need to “calm people down by holding some impromptu, exciting public events soon,” because “otherwise we’re going to have this exact exchange ad infinitum and maybe until November.”

Tapper disagreed with Coons’ argument that the media would not cover Trump’s “statements of strange or potentially disturbing things,” saying, “I think we’ve been doing that since 2015.” As well as coverage of former Trump administration officials who did not support him.

“I don’t think it’s fair to compare your thoughtlessness or mine to what we saw in the debate on Thursday and in that little clip from two weeks ago,” Tapper said.

The conversation eventually ended after discussing whether Biden should sit down for a longer live press conference or interview, which Coons reiterated was his recommendation to the campaign.

Watch the clip above on CNN.

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