MS NOW host Katy Tur said on a podcast Wednesday that President Donald Trump is still doing “much more” publicly than former President Joe Biden did, even as a New York Times report suggested the president is showing signs of “fatigue.”
On The Daily Beast Podcast, host Joanna Coles and Tur noted how visible Trump continues to make himself, with Tur arguing that he clearly relishes time in front of cameras and reporters and remains more active than his predecessor. “All of our attention is on him, we are watching this in a micro-moment by micro-moment,” she said.
Trump lashed out at the Times report, titled “Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office,” calling it a “hit piece” in a social media post. In a statement on Wednesday, the Times defended its story, saying the “reporting is accurate and built on first-hand reporting of the facts. Name-calling and personal insults don’t change that, nor will our journalists hesitate to cover this administration in the face of intimidation tactics like this.”
“I think, not to get on the bandwagon and to push back a little bit, he is doing much more than, certainly Joe Biden did,” Tur said in a clip flagged by Mediaite.
“He is out there in a way that past presidents haven’t even been out there. He does give access. He’s constantly on television,” Tur continued. “He might be slowing down for him and slowing down because he’s getting up there in age, but he is still very much mobile. I mean, he’s doing overseas travel. He’s coming back, he’s handing out Halloween candy. Sometimes these trips are one day. I mean, he is very much still engaged.”
Tur argued that any discussion about Trump’s pace should be measured against his own previous activity, not Biden’s. Trump became the oldest elected president in U.S. history when he won last year’s election at age 78.
“He’s not doing the same amount of travel that he used to. I mean, the domestic travel has certainly declined. He’s not doing those rallies. He’s not standing in front of a crowd for an hour or two hours, three hours in, you know, Grand Rapids, Michigan, any longer. And I think that’s telling. But this has got to be relative to him and not necessarily relative to Joe Biden,” she said.
Tur also recalled attending a White House Christmas party during the Biden administration and said she could barely understand Biden’s remarks.
“I went to the Christmas party, during the Biden years, and he came out at like eight o’clock, and he gave a speech to the assembled room of journalists, and you could not understand a word he was saying, right,” Tur said. “It’s different.”
The Times reported that after reviewing Trump’s schedule, it found “fewer public events” than during his first term and suggested he most often appears in public between noon and 5 p.m. The report also said Trump appeared to doze off during a recent Oval Office event.
Trump has frequently mocked Biden’s stamina, often pointing to what he describes as Biden’s mental and cognitive decline in office. That decline, critics say, ultimately contributed to Biden being forced out of the 2024 presidential race. Trump then broke Biden’s record as the oldest elected president with his own 2024 victory, after Biden had set the previous mark by winning in 2020 at age 77.
