On Saturday night, news broke that after much posturing, a deal was reached to raise the debt ceiling and avoid financial calamity. That happened despite the fact that Joe Biden himself was apparently still out of town on another vacation, which shows just how involved he is in his administration.
Not long after the deal was announced, the spin began, and no one did it more shamelessly than MSNBC. On a panel that already included Rick Wilson of The Lincoln Project and noted leftist Molly Jong-Fast, Kurt Bardella decided to one-up everyone by claiming that Biden actually won on the debt ceiling compromise.
“The win Biden just delivered,” Burdell proclaims as if the internet simply doesn’t exist and we can’t all go to Google right now and look up what was being said prior to this. As RedState has chronicled, the president spent months vowing to not negotiate at all on the debt ceiling. As recently as May 12th, just a little over two weeks before the writing of this article, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reasserted that there would be no negotiations over the debt limit. None. Zilich. Nada.
It seems rather improbable to me that someone could be called the winner of a compromise they said would never happen in the first place. The number of times that the White House said it wasn’t going to negotiate are too numerous to mention in this piece. Biden and his handlers said it over and over again in an attempt to push a public narrative that ultimately failed after Republicans unified and passed a debt ceiling bill.
And while I understand the left-wing media have to try to smooth things over with their Democrat viewers, the truth of the matter is simple: Biden caved. There’s no other way to describe what happened. Republicans did not get everything they wanted, but when one group continually says they won’t compromise and the other group demands one, the latter group wins the argument if things end up at a compromise. And they did end up at a compromise.
Now, with that said, do I personally see the deal as a win for Republicans and the nation? Not really. I’m a conservative and anything short of real, substantive spending reform isn’t going to make me happy. Unfortunately, at this point, I’m basically resigned to the fact that we are going over the cliff and it’s just a matter of what speed we do it at. But as an argument over political narrative, Biden did not win because he ended up contradicting his pledge to not negotiate and met many of the GOP demands.
MSNBC is gaslighting and moving the goalposts. No one should be confused by what they are trying to do. It’s a “heads I win, tails you lose” game, and while the nation continues to lose because no real spending cuts were ever on the table, Republicans did win the messaging battle. What that’s actually worth to any individual person will obviously vary.