White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki kicked the week off with a Monday briefing and wasted no time correcting Fox News’ Peter Doocy, who had used a wholly out-of-context question to falsely attack President Joe Biden.
“Before Joe Biden was president he said the COVID travel restrictions on foreign countries were ‘hysterical,’ ‘xenophobia’ and ‘fear mongering.’ So what changed?” Doocy demanded.
“Well, I would say first to put in full context, Peter, what the President was critical of was the way that the former President put out, I believe, a xenophobic tweet, and had and how he, what he called the coronavirus, and who he directed it at. The President has not been critical of travel restrictions. We have put those in place ourselves. We put them in place ourselves in the spring, but no he does not believe – he believes we should follow the advice of health and medical experts. That’s exactly what he did, and putting in place these restrictions over the weekend.”
In fact, as Politifact noted in March of 2020, “Biden has not directly said that the restrictions were xenophobic.”
“Around the time the Trump administration announced the travel restriction, Biden said that Trump had a ‘record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering,'” Politifact added. He did not call travel restrictions “hysterical,” “xenophobia,” or “fear mongering.”
Here’s that Biden tweet from Feb. 2020:
Politifact added that “Biden used the phrase ‘xenophobic’ in reply to a Trump tweet about limiting entry to travelers from China and in which Trump described the coronavirus as the ‘Chinese virus.'”
Here’s that tweet, from March 2020:
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