MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell took President Donald Trump‘s remarks out of context Friday — while complaining that Trump’s team had taken Joe Biden‘s remarks out of context.
Mitchell referenced the former vice president’s slip of the tongue Thursday — “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids” — as he spoke about education opportunities to an audience that was primarily Asian and Hispanic.
And while Clark’s caption may not have included Biden’s immediate reaction — a pause and then an attempt to clarify — the video included in his tweet did.
And the other thing we should do is we should challenge these students. We should challenge students in these schools, have advanced placement programs in these schools. We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor, you cannot do it. Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids. Wealthy kids, white kids, Asian kids.
But while Mitchell was complaining about Clark and others omitting the context, she defended Biden’s attacks that took Trump’s words out of context. “It comes after this confrontation between Biden and a reporter from conservative outlet Breitbart — Biden fighting back after the reporter claimed, incorrectly, Biden had misquoted the president after Charlottesville,” she said.
The Breitbart reporter in the video clip Mitchell shared confronted Biden, claiming that President Trump had very clearly condemned white supremacy, while Biden argued, as he has since he first announced his run for president, “Let’s get this straight. He said, ‘there are very fine people in both groups,’ they’re chanting anti-semitic slogans, carrying flags.”
But a look at the president’s full remarks following the unrest in Charlottesville, showed that the reporter was right, that Biden had taken Trump’s words out of context and that Mitchell had doubled down, accepting Biden’s misquote as the whole story.