White House press secretary calls Fox News reporter’s question ‘ridiculous’

Conservatives have reacted with shock to Biden denouncement of Trumpism

Fox News’s Peter Doocy joined the list of conservatives taking issue with Joe Biden calling out Donald Trump and the ongoing threat that his efforts to spread conspiracies and lies about the 2020 election on Tuesday.

Doocy once again sparred with Mr Biden’s press team at the White House’s daily news briefing, hosted on Tuesday by press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

The right-leaning journalist questioned Ms Pierre about her own past remarks about Donald Trump supposedly stealing the 2016 election, which Ms Jean-Pierre made when she was a private citizen. Many Democrats harboured similar views at the time given the reporting about Russian election interference, although Mr Trump’s campaign was never proven to have been connected to those malicious efforts.

“If denying election results is extreme now, why wasn't it then?" asked Mr Doocy.

Ms Jean-Pierre responded that his question was “ridiculous”.

Indeed, the comparisons between Donald Trump’s efforts after the 2020 election, which continue to this day, and past complaints by various Democrats of supposed election shenanigans are hardly fair. Mr Trump’s supporters attacked Congress in an unprecedented and historical assault on January 6, 2021, while the president’s own campaign legal team had for months sought to impede the transfer of power by convincing state legislatures to pass resolutions declaring their respective states’ results invalid, despite those lawmaking bodies having zero constitutional authority to do so.

No former president in US history has ever publicly demanded to be reinstated in the White House nearly two years after being defeated at the ballot box, either. Mr Trump has trodden new ground on both those fronts, leading to never-before-seen distrust in America’s election systems by wide swaths of his party.

Fox News platformed Mr Trump’s conspiracies about the 2020 election for weeks after Mr Trump was defeated, but eventually those views were driven off the cable news network by legal action taken by the manufacturers of voting machines which were the targets of many such conspiracies.

The network has loudly denounced the lawsuits it now faces of from Smartmatic and Dominion voting systems, which are both seeking billions in damages.

"We are confident we will prevail as freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected, in addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs,” a network spokesperson previously said.