Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) on Sunday claimed that he wasn’t questioning President Biden’s capabilities as commander in chief, following the Texas senator’s tweet last week that took issue with the President’s normal tweets.
Last week, Cornyn tweeted an excerpt from a Politico article on Biden’s modest media presence, before posting a follow-up tweet suggesting that the President’s restraint on Twitter usage “invites the question: is he really in charge?”
Invites the question: is he really in charge?
— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) April 12, 2021
Asked about his tweet and whether it was “helpful” to question Biden’s mental faculties during an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Cornyn insisted that his tweet was innocuous and that he was simply tweeting his thoughts aloud.
“I think there’s been a lot of confusion in the Twitterverse about that,” Cornyn said. “That actually was a quote from a Politico story that I pasted into a tweet and then I simply asked a question.”
Cornyn said he was supposedly trying to “reconcile” Biden’s posture when he entered office as the President in January, his previous term as a senator and his first legislative success in the passage of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan without Republican support.
“I’ve learned in Washington, you not only need to listen to what people say, you need to watch what they do,” Cornyn said. “And so far, there’s a conflict I’m trying to reconcile and I bet I’m not the only one.”
Pressed again on whether his tweet meant that he actually questions whether Biden is “really in charge,” Cornyn said that it was not meant to insinuate anything regarding the President’s competency.
“I know some people have suggested that and that certainly wasn’t my intention,” Cornyn said, appearing to refer to a gambit that former President Trump and his allies deployed throughout the 2020 presidential election cycle as a baseless way to attack Biden. “I simply tried to reconcile the rhetoric with the reality.”
Cornyn then made a rich assertion of calling for “the reality to match the rhetoric,” without acknowledging the Republican Party’s loyalty to Trump, who has called for GOP unity while attacking those in the party that dared to vote in favor of his impeachment after inciting the mob behind the deadly Capitol insurrection.
Watch Cornyn’s remarks below:
"I simply asked a question" — John Cornyn defends his tweets criticizing Biden for not posting unhinged tweets like Trump did pic.twitter.com/8xYlHqaXNZ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 18, 2021
