Brit Hume warns Biden's gaffes suggest former VP 'is losing his memory and is getting senile'

Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume told "Tucker Carlson Tonight" Tuesday that a series of slip-ups by former Vice President Joe Biden during his campaign for the Democratic nomination suggest that the 77-year-old former senator, "like so many people his age, is losing his memory and is getting senile."
"I don't think there's any doubt about this," Hume said. "I have traces of this myself. I know what it feels like. Sometimes you're confused, sometimes you can't remember, 'What are you supposed to do the next morning?' -- and I'm not running for president and it's probably a good thing I'm not."
Hume added that Biden's recent performance on the campaign trail is different from his long history of gaffes: "If you've known him long enough, you kind of get used to that and you think they're kind of funny and they're just part of who he is and they're kind of harmless ...
"More recently, however, he's begun to forget things," Hume added. "He didn't know what state he's in, he couldn't remember where he was when he met the Parkland [Florida] students, when he said he was in the White House."
Hume also commended on the now-viral confrontation between Biden and a Michigan auto plant worker over the Second Amendment Tuesday, saying that also showed a different, more troubling side of the Democratic frontrunner.
"I’ve known him a long time, and he can sometimes work himself up into kind of a passion in speeches and so on when he was arguing about issues and so on in a debate," Hume said. "But I don’t remember him exploding at voters like he did in this incident today, and hurling profanity the way he did, telling the guy he was ‘full of spit,’ except he didn’t say ‘spit’. That’s something new."
Hume warned that Democratic voters and officials distracted by the effort to prevent Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., from gaining the nomination may have overlooked Biden's difficulties up until now, but will find them impossible to ignore soon.
"I think that over time, the danger for him [Biden] and for his party is that he may say something that’s so outlandish and so suggestive that his cognitive faculties have failed him, that Democratic voters are going to say, ‘Oh, my Lord, what have we got here?’" Hume said, adding: "... Under the pressures of a campaign, who knows what will happen?"

Biden's 'Joe-mentum' grows as Dem front-runner sweeps Midwest contests, eyes Sanders knockout

History didn’t repeat itself in Michigan for Bernie Sanders.
And because of that, the populist U.S. senator from Vermont had an extremely disappointing evening on "Super Tuesday II" -- and now faces daunting delegate math that leaves him slipping swiftly out of reach of the Democratic presidential nomination.
Just four years ago, it was in Michigan where Sanders pulled off a historic upset over eventual nominee Hillary Clinton. At the time, the victory kept his White House bid alive.
Fast forward four years later and Sanders – down in the public opinion polls by double digits once again in the Great Lake State – was convincingly defeated by former Vice President Joe Biden.
Four years ago Sanders nearly topped Clinton in Missouri. This time around he lost the state by a nearly 2-to-1 margin to Biden. And the former vice president trounced Sanders in Mississippi and won in Idaho as well.
Sanders – who won a landslide victory in the 2016 Washington state caucuses – was neck and neck with Biden in the state’s 2020 primary with just over two-thirds of the vote counted. Biden initially had the slight edge in Idaho – with more than three-quarters of the vote counted -- and was eventually declared the winner.
Sanders was up in North Dakota’s caucuses, where only 14 delegates were up for grabs.

Undisputed front-runner

Biden’s blockbuster performance boosted his lead in the all-important race for presidential convention delegates and further cemented his status as the undisputed front-runner for the Democratic nomination. And Biden's strong performance presented Sanders with a difficult choice to make on whether to continue his White House bid.
In a remarkable and uncharacteristic move, Sanders opted not to deliver a primary night address, passing on the opportunity to speak to a national audience.
Biden, speaking near his national campaign headquarters in Philadelphia on Tuesday night after canceling a rally in Cleveland due to coronavirus concerns – and after an ugly clash with an auto worker in Michigan earlier in the day -- reached out to Sanders and his legions of supporters with an olive branch.
“I want to thank Bernie Sanders and his supporters for their tireless energy and their passion. We share a common goal and together we’ll defeat Donald Trump. We’ll defeat him together,” Biden said.

“I want to thank Bernie Sanders and his supporters for their tireless energy and their passion. We share a common goal and together we’ll defeat Donald Trump. We’ll defeat him together.”
— Joe Biden

And Biden spotlighted how many of his former rivals, as well as much of the Democratic Party’s establishment, have coalesced around his campaign in the week and a half since his landslide victory in the South Carolina primary – which was followed three days later by his sweeping victories the first Super Tuesday, March 3.
“In just the past week, so many of my incredibly capable competitors have endorsed me. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Mike Bloomberg, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris,” Biden noted. “Together we’re bringing this party together. That’s what we have to do.”
Sanders flew home to Burlington, Vt., after also canceling a primary night campaign rally in Cleveland due to coronavirus concerns. Huddling with his advisers, the senator now faces a primary calendar that doesn’t get any easier.
The four major states that hold primaries next week – Florida, Illinois, Ohio, and Arizona – were states that Sanders lost to Clinton four years ago.

Coalition comes together

Sanders spent most of his time the past week stumping in Michigan. But there and in the other larger states that held contests Tuesday, Sanders wasn’t able to expand on his base. Biden – meanwhile – once again assembled a large coalition of votes – solidly winning among African-Americans, women and suburban voters.
A Fox News voter analysis in Michigan indicated Biden topped Sanders by more than 20 points among white voters without a college degree. Sanders cleaned up with white working class voters in the primary four years ago. That foreshadowed Clinton’s narrow loss to Donald Trump in the November 2016 general election in Michigan. Trump’s victory with working-class white voters in the state, as well as similar narrow wins in two other crucial Rust Belt states – Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – propelled him to the White House.
“The entire electability argument of the Sanders campaign has been that he can, one, win a broad coalition, and two, he can grow turnout. Based on actual vote totals to date, he has not been able to do either. Joe Biden has,” said Mo Elleithee, the founding executive director of Georgetown University's Institute of Politics and Public Service and a Fox News contributor.
“And that is the story of this primary season so far. We saw that in South Carolina, we saw it on Super Tuesday, and we saw it again tonight. And it’s given Biden a near insurmountable lead in delegates,” added Elleithee, a senior spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign who later served as communications director for the Democratic National Committee.

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Sanders fights for another rust belt upset to regain momentum against Biden

78 years

Underscoring what’s at stake for his White House bid when Michigan and five other states hold Democratic presidential nomination contests on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders emphasizes that “this is a very, very important day in Michigan.”
Speaking in front of more than 10,000 people at a rally at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the populist senator from Vermont on Sunday spotlighted that Michigan’s “the most important state” to hold a contest on March 10, which is being dubbed ‘mini Super Tuesday’ or ‘Super Tuesday 2.0.’

Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a campaign rally at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich., Sunday, March 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

With 125 pledged delegates at stake, Michigan is the biggest prize among the six states holding contests on Tuesday. The others are Missouri, Mississippi, Washington state, Idaho and North Dakota.
Sanders, a populist senator who’s making his second-straight presidential run, defeated eventual nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016's primary in Michigan, in what was considered a major upset victory. That foreshadowed Clinton’s narrow loss to Donald Trump in the November 2016 general election in Michigan. Trump’s victory with working-class white voters in the state, as well as similar narrow wins in two other crucial Rust Belt states – Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – propelled him to the White House.
The pre-Michigan primary polls in 2016 got it all wrong – as they indicated Clinton with a double-digit lead over Sanders.
“The 2016 Michigan Democratic primary is considered to be the biggest polling miss of that cycle. Polls released in the week before the state primary showed Hillary Clinton with anywhere from a 10 to 27 point lead," noted Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray.
Fast forward four years and former Vice President Joe Biden’s now the clear front-runner in Michigan with the final polls released on primary eve indicating the former vice president with a double-digit lead over Sanders.
But Sanders is holding out hope for a repeat performance that would stave off elimination and instead boost the senator back into a massive battle with Biden for the nomination.
An optimistic Sanders predicted on Fox News Sunday “I think we're gonna do well on Tuesday, and we're gonna beat Biden.”
While a loss would be considered a setback, Sanders doesn’t see such a prospect as fatal.
“I certainly would not consider dropping out,” he stressed.
Sanders was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination after winning the Feb. 11 New Hampshire primary and then shellacking the field a week and a half later at the Nevada caucuses. But thanks to his landslide victory in South Carolina a week and a half ago – and a strong performance during last week’s Super Tuesday when he swept 10 of the 14 states holding primaries on Super Tuesday and took the lead over Sanders in the all-important race for Democratic nomination convention delegates – Biden’s moved closer to locking up the nomination.
Because of its general election political symbolism and the large delegate cache, Michigan’s capturing the lion’s share of media attention among this week’s round of contests.
Biden - very cognizant of the polling debacle in 2016 – stressed on Monday that “I’m kind of superstitious, I see all these polls...I remember Hillary was up by 23 points...I don’t take anything for granted.”
Biden, with an eye on November’s general election, emphasized during a rally Monday in Flint that “Michigan is an important contest not just for the Democratic primary, because the outcome of Michigan in November may determine who the next person United States is going to be.”
The former vice president’s enjoyed a tidal wave of endorsements from current and former members of Congress and governors the past 10 days - as the party establishment and other moderates all coalesced around Biden to prevent Sanders – a self-described democratic socialist – from becoming the party’s standard-bearer in November’s general election.
And many of his former rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination have endorsed his White House bid. Two of those one-time rivals – Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California – joined Biden on the campaign trail in Michigan on Monday after backing him just in the past 24 hours.
Sanders, fighting for survival, has increased his jabs at Biden in the wake of Super Tuesday.
At a Fox News town hall on primary eve in Detroit, Sanders charged that Biden had "bailed out the crooks on Wall Street who nearly destroyed our economy 12 years ago."
But he failed to mention that $700 billion rescue plan also had the support of then-presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.
A day earlier in Ann Arbor, Sanders slammed the former vice president  - saying “here we are a few days before a major primary here in Michigan. And we are taking on, in this campaign, not just Joe Biden….We're taking on the 60 billionaires who are funding his campaign.
Biden, in a much more comfortable position, has refrained from blasting Sanders. Instead, on Monday he gently jabbed his rival, saying “we’re not looking for a revolution.” The push for a political revolution has long been a staple of Sanders stump speech.
But the former vice president’s aiming for what he hopes will a be a near knockout punch to Sanders.
Democratic strategist Michael Ceraso – a veteran of the 2016 Sanders campaign and the 2020 White House bid by former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg – stressed that a Biden victory in Michigan coupled with likely wins in Missouri and Mississippi will “put a huge hurdle in front of Sanders to get the delegates he needs to win.”

Trump to pitch Congress on payroll tax cut, relief for small business amid coronavirus crisis

President Trump said Monday evening that he will be meeting with congressional leaders on Tuesday to press them about what can be done to help the economy as it struggles amid the coronavirus outbreak.
Trump said that he plans to meet with Senate leadership on Wednesday to discuss a payroll tax cut, small business aid and help for hourly workers who might become sick.
“They’ll be very dramatic,” Trump said of the proposed economic measures during an evening briefing at the White House. “This blindsided the world and I think we handled it very well.”
Trump told reporters that the administration was seeking “very substantial relief." Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow were expected to make the request of Senate Republicans on Tuesday afternoon.
The markets appeared to react positively to Trump's announcement, with futures on all three major indices surging by more than two percent.
The president, who was joined in the White House briefing room by Vice President Mike Pence and the rest of the coronavirus task force, praised his administration’s work in combatting the virus – including prohibiting entry into the U.S. from certain countries and coordinating with state governors – and reiterated that the spread of the virus was not caused by mismanagement within Washington.
“This is not our country’s fault, this was something that was thrown at us,” Trump said. “The main thing is we’re taking care of the American public.”
Before his press conference, Trump met Mnuchin, Kudlow and other aides about a range of economic actions he could take. He also invited Wall Street executives to the White House on Wednesday to discuss the economic fallout of the epidemic.
Kudlow told reporters Friday that the administration is not looking at a “massive” federal relief plan. Rather, any federal aid package would be “timely and targeted and micro.”
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill had barely started to contemplate the economic implications of the spread of the virus and what might be needed to stimulate the economy as people cancel vacations and business trips and stay away from stores. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told reporters that “everything’s on the table."
But members of the Senate Republican leadership, including Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, played down the need for an economic stimulus package of any kind, be it tax cuts or aid for workers. “It’s premature to be talking about that,” Cornyn told reporters. “I usually love tax cuts but I think it’s a little premature.”
Democrats have indicated they preferred other responses, like passing legislation requiring employers to give their workers paid sick leave — a longtime policy priority of Democrats — and additional help for those with lower incomes.
Pence, who is heading the task force combatting the outbreak of coronavirus, noted once again that the chances of Americans contracting the virus remain low – and of becoming seriously ill even lower – but warned that the precautions outlined by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should still be followed.
While intent on projecting calm, Trump earlier in the day lashed out about the plunging stock market and convened a meeting of his top economic advisers to address what to do about it. Meanwhile, the number of Republican lawmakers who announced they were isolating themselves because of possible exposure to the virus grew to five.
As Trump grappled with an epidemic whose consequences he has repeatedly played down, the White House asserted it was conducting “business as usual.” But the day's business was anything but normal. Lawmakers pressed for details on how the Capitol could be made secure, a Pentagon meeting was broken into sub-groups to minimize the number of people in the same room and the Army commander in Europe placed himself in a precautionary quarantine.
The president dove into handshakes with supporters Monday morning when arriving to headline a fundraiser in Longwood, Fla., that raised approximately $4 million for his reelection campaign and the Republican Party. He ignored shouted questions about the sinking stock market as he boarded Air Force One for the flight back to Washington.
On that flight was Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who later went into a voluntary quarantine. He was one of several GOP lawmakers who were exposed to a person at last month's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) who later tested positive for the virus.
Trump did not respond to shouted questions by reporters if he had been tested for the coronavirus following his flight with Gaetz. Pence said he did not know if the president had been tested but told reporters he had not himself received a test for the virus.
Late Monday evening, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham issued a statement saying that Trump had not received testing for coronavirus because "he has neither had prolonged close contact with any known confirmed COVID-19 patients, nor does he have any symptoms"
"President Trump remains in excellent health, and his physician will continue to closely monitor him," Grisham said.
On Monday, Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., and Gaetz put themselves in voluntary quarantine because of their contacts with the infected person at CPAC.
Both said they did not have any symptoms but would wait out the remainder of the 14 days since the contact at home. Gaetz last week wore a gas mask to the House vote on the emergency funding bill for the virus response and said he wanted to highlight how Congress could become a “petri dish” for the virus.
Collins met Trump on Tuesday night at the White House and shook hands with him Friday when the president visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Atlanta headquarters.
“The president of the United States, as we all know, is quite a hand-washer," press secretary Stephanie Grisham told Fox News earlier Monday. "He uses hand sanitizer all the time. So he's not concerned about this at all.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Trump camp fires back after Twitter labels Biden video 'manipulated'

EXCLUSIVE: The Trump campaign has sent a scathing letter to Twitter's leadership after the platform took the unprecedented step of labeling one of its videos "manipulated media," saying that under the social media giant's new standard, Joe Biden's team has uploaded its own "doctored and deceptively edited" video as recently as last week.
“The Biden campaign is scared as hell that voters will see the flood of unedited and embarrassing verbal stumbles that will continue go viral if ‘Status Quo Joe’ is the nominee," Trump campaign rapid response director Andrew Clark told Fox News. "Twitter shouldn’t be an enforcement arm of Joe Biden’s campaign strategy, but if they choose to police every video clip they must hold his own campaign to the same standard.”
The confrontation began this the weekend when Trump communications director Dan Scavino tweeted an edited version of a Biden speech in which the former vice president appears to deliver a muddled and inadvertent endorsement of Trump. Scavino's clip, which the president later reposted, did not alter any of Biden's words, but it cut off before the conclusion of Biden's sentence at a rally in St. Louis. Conservatives called the video an obvious attempt to highlight Biden's verbal gaffes, and argued that no one would reasonably mistake it for a genuine Biden endorsement.
"Understandably, the Biden campaign has a strategic interest in intimidating social media companies into suppressing true and embarrassing video evidence of Joe Biden’s continued inability to communicate coherently—a sad truth that has been publicly noted by Democrats and media figures alike," Trump campaign chief operating officer Michael Glassner wrote in the missive to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, general counsel Vijaya Gadde, and public policy director Carlos Monje.
"Still, it appears that many people employed by Big Tech corporations in Silicon Valley are assisting the Biden campaign by instituting a special ‘Biden protection rule’ that effectively censors and silences legitimate political speech Biden’s campaign and its supporters do not like," he added in the letter, obtained by Fox News.
Glassner said he was "formally requesting that Twitter apply its new 'manipulated media' label to a doctored and deceptively edited video tweeted by the Biden campaign less than a week ago."
That was a reference to a March 3 video uploaded by the Biden campaign that contains a slew of clips that are taken out of context, and "manipulates audio and video of President Trump in order to mislead Americans and give a false impression," Glassner wrote.
The video, Glassner points out, contains two clips "spliced together to fabricate a quote and give viewers the false impression that he called the coronavirus a 'hoax,'" a claim that the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network has previously debunked. The president in fact called Democrats' response to the coronavirus "their new hoax."
Additionally, the Biden video effectively repeats a false claim the former vice president himself made in his campaign launch video, asserting through selective editing that the president called white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va. "very fine people." That assertion, although widely made in progressive circles, is untrue; the president was referring to protesters on both sides of the issue of whether Confederate statues should be removed from public places as "very fine people."
"In fact, 49 seconds after President Trump said those words, he said, 'and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally,'" Glassner wrote. "As one CNN anchor said, 'he’s not saying that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are very fine people[.]'".

"If Twitter is not seeking to protect Joe Biden, we urge it to correct its apparent oversight and apply its standards equally across the board."
— Trump campaign COO Michael Glassner

Third, the Biden video contains a 2016 clip in which then-candidate Trump declares "the American Dream is dead" -- but leaves out the second part of Trump's sentence, in which he says, "but if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again.”
READ THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN'S LETTER TO TWITTER CEO
"Of course, this is not the first time the Biden campaign has used editing tricks to manipulate video and feed misinformation to the American people," Glassner wrote. "If Twitter is not seeking to protect Joe Biden, we urge it to correct its apparent oversight and apply its standards equally across the board."
Fox News has identified several other videos posted to Biden's Twitter account that contain similar misleading clips. An October 2019 post on Biden's campaign account, for example, states that Trump "has asked foreign governments to interfere in our elections," and is accompanied by a video of a White House interview that omits Trump's full remarks.
In the full interview, Trump says, "I think maybe you do both," referring to notifying the FBI as well as listening to an offer of political help from a foreign entity; but in the Biden clip, Trump says only that he would "listen" to the proposal from a foreign entity.
Glassner made clear that the Trump campaign was not backing off its original video of Biden, saying the clip was "a 100 percent real, 100 percent authentic, 100 percent unedited video of Joe Biden saying, 'We cannot win this re-election. Excuse me. We can only re-elect Donald Trump[.]'"
In order for American elections to remain "free and fair," Glassner wrote, "it is critical that the Biden campaign be held to the same standard it is demanding apply to others."
In the post uploaded by Scavino, Biden seemingly endorses the president after stammering over some words.
"Turn this primary from a campaign that's about negative attacks into one about what we're for, because we cannot get -- re-elect -- we cannot win this re-election -- excuse me. We can only re-elect Donald Trump," Biden says in the edited clip. In the full speech, Biden went on to add," -- if, in fact, we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. Gotta be a positive campaign, so join us."
Twitter quickly labeled the tweet "misinformation," in the social media giant's first-ever use of its new policy, which is ostensibly designed to combat the spread of false news. The so-called Synthetic and Manipulated Media policy states that "you may not deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm."
The policy went into effect Mar. 5 after a campaign video from Mike Bloomberg's team added crickets and a long silence when Bloomberg asked his rivals if any of them had started a business. Facebook has said that the Trump video would not meet its platform for deceptive editing.
Currently, no misinformation flag appears on the video for some users when it is directly clicked, although a warning does appear if the video shows up in a user's feed. Twitter has said it is working to apply the warning whenever the clip is accessed.
BILLIONAIRE REPUBLICAN BUYS MAJOR STAKE IN TWITTER, COULD OUST CEO SOON
The broader issue of Biden's potential competency issues looms large over the 2020 presidential race. Also in St. Louis, Biden bizarrely described himself as an "O'Biden Bama" Democrat, transposing his name and the name of his old boss.
Trump suggested at a Fox News Town Hall last week that Biden isn't fit for office.
"I'm all set for Bernie, communist," Trump began. "And then we have this crazy thing that happened on Tuesday, which he [Biden] thought was Thursday. But he also said 150 million people were killed with guns, and that he was running for the U.S. Senate -- there's something going on there."

Mark Meadows, Trump’s incoming chief of staff, to self-quarantine over coronavirus fears

Mark Meadows, President Trump’s incoming White House chief of staff, may have come in contact with the Conservative Political Action Conference attendee who was diagnosed with the coronavirus and "out of an abundance of caution" will self-quarantine over the next two weeks.
His office said the North Carolina Republican tested negative for COVID-19 and has zero symptoms. He joins fellow Republican lawmakers—including Reps. Doug Collins of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida—who said they were in contact with the individual at CPAC. None are experiencing any symptoms.
Gaetz was spotted riding on Air Force One last week as he learned the news. White House officials said when Gaetz learned he was in proximity to the man with coronavirus at CPAC, he sat by himself in a section of the president's plane.
He told the Washington Post that by the end of the flight, Trump "coaxed" him to the front of the plane. Gaetz told the paper that Trump didn't seem "hyper-cautious about being in the same space that I was in."
Trump and Vice President Mike Pence spoke at CPAC, but the White House said there was no indication that either had met or been in “close proximity” to the infected attendee.
The number of individuals who were in contact with the individual has raised concerns about whether the president was exposed.
Stephanie Grisham, the White House spokeswoman, said Trump has not taken a COVID-19 test because he did not have prolonged, close contact with any patients. She also said that he has no symptoms, but will be closely monitored by his physician.
Trump made a surprise announcement last week when he named Meadows as his replacement for Mick Mulvaney. Mulvaney will become the U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland.
In a statement, Meadows said it was an "honor" to selected by Trump.
Fox News' Brooke Singman and Alex Pappas contributed to this report

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