‘I’ll read my daily briefings’: Joe Biden hailed online for setting ‘lowest bar ever’ for US president

Presumptive Democratic nominee for President Joe Biden has perplexed the Internet by making a highly confusing brag against sitting President Donald Trump, by saying that he will “read his daily briefings.”

Biden’s tweet came on the heels of unconfirmed media speculation that Trump did not read his presidential briefings, supposedly including the one that said Russia offered bounties for the killing of US troops in Afghanistan. Trump dismissed the bounty report claims as a “fake-news tale,” and said he wasn’t briefed on the matter, as it “did not rise to that level of threat.”

Former President Barack Obama reportedly counseled Biden to keep his tweets short, but the strategy seems to have backfired, as Biden provoked very mixed reactions from Twitter users.

The lack of overt context in his statement quickly led many commenters to declare his pledge the “lowest bar ever” for a presidential hopeful. 

Some of Biden’s detractors found irony in the boast, playing on recent clips of the Democrat’s apparent confusion and saying his pledge rather accurately matches his mental acuity levels. Jokes were also made that the former vice president cannot “read the teleprompter, never mind the daily briefings.”

His supporters, however, thought the tweet on point in skewering Trump, adding that Biden “won’t just sit by while Russia kills [American] troops.” Some even jested that the mere fact of Biden reading at all is enough of an edge over Trump to warrant their support for him. 

Biden’s campaign has been plagued by media mishaps from the start. He currently stages only a limited number of public and media appearances, prompting speculation that keeping the candidate “in the basement” is less about Covid-19 preventative measures and more about his campaign team’s chosen strategy to prevent him from further blunders.

So far, the approach appears to be bearing fruit, as Biden’s polling numbers, largely unaffected by his infamous gaffes, have stretched ahead of Trump’s. His national lead, according to Reuters/Ipsos, is eight percent, and he’s reportedly been leading in states across the country for months.

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