Fox News is still dealing with the fallout of “parting ways” with top-rated host Tucker Carlson. But some fans are praising “The Five” co-host Greg Gutfeld as the “last trustworthy person” on Fox News after he went viral for ripping President Joe Biden’s handling of the devastating fires in Maui.
Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden visited Maui on Monday, where they toured the devastation that’s left more than 110 people dead and hundreds still missing. It’s the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history.
His visit followed initial criticism of his government’s slow response to the disaster. FEMA reported on Monday that more than 1,000 federal workers have since arrived in Maui, where the fires first broke out on August 8.
However, during his visit, the president came under fire from detractors for seeming to draw parallels between the wildfires and what the Associated Press described as a “small fire that was contained to the kitchen” at his Delaware home 15 years prior.
Below is a transcript of the exchange on The Five:
TARLOV: “I don’t think that he should have obviously used that example. You could have just easily said that, ‘I’ve seen the awesome work that firefighters do all over the country and this is a great travesty,’ et cetera. So, I think that that was misguided. I can’t buy into the idea that Joe Biden has been conning the American public for five decades in terms of — “
GUTFELD: “The media has.”
TARLOV: “No, but people listen to him. He has been on debate stages, he has gotten elected and reelected and reelected, and people really like him. That is why they supported him. That’s why he won in 2020, because he was someone who was connecting to people. He was the guy talking to the little kid with a stutter, right, about how he grew up and how he got past that and went on to be running for president and then eventually won. So I will give you that that was a bad comparison, but there have been so many craven lies told about the timeline of the response on this. Jesse just said his first comments were ‘No comment,’ which is just categorically untrue. That was on August 13. The wildfire started on August 8th. On August 10th, that is when a major disaster happened, he got the call, the request from Hawaii to do that, it took him just 63 minutes to sign that.”
WATTERS: “He signed a piece of paper. I’m talking about significant public comments.”
TARLOV: “Just wait for it. And then later that day he was in Utah talking about something else and he opened up by commenting on what was going on in Hawaii and how devastating it was. Listen to what the governor of Hawaii Josh Green said: ‘Within six hours, the administration met our needs with federal movement. I don’t think that’s ever happened before.’ The Maui County mayor: ‘I wanted to say the response of the president has been he called me, I asked her to help that we needed, and within two hours, one of his cabinet members called me to answer my question. We have been getting all the help that we need.’”
GUTFELD: “That’s the Maui mayor. Just pointing that out.”
TARLOV: “Right. And you don’t think at a time when there are hundreds of people dead and there’s another thousand people that are missing, that the Maui mayor wouldn’t have said, ‘Joe Biden is lying to you when he says those things?’”
GUTFELD: “Oh, you’ve got to be nice. You’ve got to be nice. Because you’re hoping for something.”
TARLOV: “You’re hoping for all the things that he got. The FEMA aid came in. I saw Republicans criticize him, why did he only give them $700? That’s the FEMA limit. This thing about the ground, the hot ground, he was talking to a dog whose paws were on the ground. It’s not like he’s saying — “
PIRRO: “Oh, what a guy! Talking to a dog? Are you kidding me?! This is a guy who goes to an inferno, an inferno where a thousand of people and children are missing because they cannot get any idea they have been so destroyed, there is no intelligence reports, no fingerprints, there’s no body prints, there is nothing, that is why they cannot identify everyone. And he talks to a dog, and he talks about the fact that he almost lost a cat? Are you kidding me? He almost lost a cat? ‘Jill and I know what it’s like to lose.’ This guy has been lying from the moment he came onto the political scene. He has a lack of empathy, he is egocentric, he’s got a condescending smirk whenever anybody asks him a question from the press. He is lying and he is narcissistic. And you know what? He is not trying to make it feel like he is part of their misery. He is a narcissist and an egomaniac who is trying to make it about himself. And you know what? I bet he got more than $700 when he had that so-called fire in his house. And on the same day that Biden offered the $700 checks, he gave Ukraine $200 million to Kyiv — “
TARLOV: “So what?”
PIRRO: “Let me finish. So what? What about the people in Hawaii who are saying, ‘We are Americans, aren’t we? Why aren’t we getting that kind of money?+ The people and Kyiv have already gotten, in Ukraine, $113 billion. $700? They don’t have food, clothing, shelter, a home, and they are missing their family. Don’t tell me $700 is enough. And when he says — Karine Jean-Pierre does not know what the hell she’s talking about. She says Joe Biden cares about people? Karine, explain why he said, when they asked the rising toll, he said, ‘No comment.’ The bottom line is, he systematically lies. He says he was Greek, he was Jewish, he was raised in a Puerto Rican community, and to Charlamagne Tha God, ‘You ain’t black if you don’t vote for me.’ He is just a narcissist who does not belong on the world stage.”
