Tuesday, January 9, 2024
Year : 1, Issue : 19
Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman mounting a long-shot challenge to Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, praised the Trump White House for its outreach on issues and legislation he worked on and said he had “not seen any of that reach-out by the Biden White House”.
“I don’t believe that we’ve had a president recently that invested in the way one needs to develop … those relationships and that work ethic,” Phillips told Johanna Maska, host of the Press Advance podcast and a former aide to Barack Obama.
Phillips’ criticism may touch a nerve in the White House but it will not be a surprise. The 54-year-old has insisted on the campaign trail that Biden is both too old and the wrong man to take on Trump should Trump win the Republican nomination. His effort to primary Biden has also irritated the White House, which has been staunch in its criticism of him.
Phillips described a “Friday evening” intervention by the Trump administration to extend a US Customs and Immigration program, Deferred Enforced Departure, in relation to Liberians in the US, “sign[ing] off on an extension of that program that saved hundreds of families” from deportation to the African country.
Phillips also discussed working with Chip Roy, a hard-right Texas Republican, on the Paycheck Protection Program Flexibility Act, a 2020 reform to Covid-era federal aid, concerning forgiveness of small business loans.
Phillips told Maska the US needed an “executive” in the White House, saying “the President Obama I loved, he was never an executive”.
Maska said Obama was “an amazing leader, and could absolutely have been an executive, like clearly was an organiser, clearly was a professor”.
Biden was not an executive, Phillips said, and nor was Trump, whom he called “a disaster … a developer, not an executive”.Source: Reuters
