Are Only Democrats Guilty of ‘Gaffes’?

Eric Boehlert: “Most of President Joe Biden’s historic foreign policy speech given over the weekend was washed away by the press. For days, journalists fixated not on how the Poland address marked a fundamental change in the West’s relationship with Russia, but on a nine-word ad-lib that Biden added to the text, ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,’ in reference to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Journalists rushed in to claim the ‘gaffe’ had produced ‘shock waves’ around the world…”

“The media theatrics were especially galling since the previous president spent four years struggling to string together coherent sentences, garbling his way through a presidency.”

“Famous for being a habitual liar, as well as boasting often impossible-to-follow syntax that left people scratching their heads trying to make sense of his oddball pronouncements, Trump obliterated the idea that an occasional gaffe ought to define a politician, and the press stopped caring about his nonstop missteps.”

Jay Rosen: “You will notice that the use of ‘gaffe’ almost disappeared during Trump’s term as president because most of what he said was a gaffe— or would have been under a previous president.”