Biden Called Him a “Stupid Son of a B—-.” He Keeps Showing Up at the White House Anyway. What’s His Secret?

This is part of Sly as Fox, a short series about the perils of underestimating Fox News in 2024. 

Peter Doocy, Fox News’ White House correspondent since 2020, has made a name for himself with pointed and at times heated questioning of Biden administration officials at briefings and other events. Doocy’s first interactions with former press secretary Jen Psaki became news stories themselves, like when he asked what Biden would call his own COVID travel bans after calling Trump’s “xenophobic.” His questions tend to earn candid—if not exasperated—responses, especially from Joe Biden, who once said himself, “I know he always asks me tough questions, and he always has an edge to them, but I like him anyway.”

Politico magazine once asked of Doocy, “Is Fox’s Peter Doocy Just Asking Questions—Or Trolling the White House?” I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t asked myself a similar question. But watching his work in the briefing room beyond sound bites, you start to see more craft in it, especially in moving ahead stories the Biden administration prefers not to discuss. And you can begin to understand why despite it all, Biden officials themselves haven’t stopped calling on him. Though he doesn’t see himself as the opposition, Doocy does think it is his role to put pressure on the administration, and in a recent phone conversation, he said he doesn’t give much thought to how that makes him look—or whether people tend to associate him with the talking heads at Fox. We discussed his off-the-cuff interactions with the president (who also, for good measure, once called him a “stupid son of a bitch”), how to get Biden to talk, and whether he’d change his approach under a President Trump. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

When you’re in the briefing room, what is going on in your head? Are you rehearsing your questions beforehand? Is there a certain strategy?

Peter Doocy: The first question is always good to establish what topic we’re interested in that day, especially because a lot of times we are going to be covering topics that, even if the briefing has been going on for an hour, haven’t come up yet. That second question is where we can really start to probe why something is happening that maybe the press team has not prepared for the press secretary or for the president as part of an official response. And I try to get as much information out of that second question and the third question, knowing that if we’re lucky, we will get three questions to the press secretary.

How does that usually turn out for you?

More often than not, I think we are able to generate exchanges that actually inform the audience about something that is going on, even if Karine [Jean-Pierre] or the president don’t really want to give a ton of detail, and maybe they don’t have a ton of detail yet because there’s some breaking news, but if you play a little bit of the question and the meat of the answer, I think people that don’t sit around watching the whole briefing at Whitehouse.gov are actually going to figure out, “OK, I didn’t know that this was going on, that’s an interesting answer.” And then they can decide whether or not they agree with it or disagree with it.

How much of your question-crafting process is your curiosity versus generating an interesting sound bite for a Fox News audience? Are you thinking about how audiences and voters are going to be thinking about these answers at all?

It’s all my curiosity. I think that’s reflected in that my question 99 percent of the time is going to be something different than anybody else has covered that day. And a lot of the times, it’s stuff that we haven’t even covered on the channel yet. If I have an ability to find a story that nobody is talking about yet and get an interesting answer from somebody at the White House, that is great to start the next day with, and then we can get reactions from others to what the White House said. But I would say that every day is just driven by my curiosity.

It’s your first election year as a White House correspondent. How has that changed your job?

When we got here to the White House—and when I say we, I mean me and Joe Biden—it was very different because it was peak COVID. There were only 13 of us at a time in the press briefings, all socially distanced, which meant that every briefing I would get at least five minutes of questions. I could cover so many different topics and have so many follow-ups, and it was great. And it was a very, very small press pool that rotated for presidential events, but there were never any invited guests and the staff was so limited that it would just be a small group of us and the president speaking in the East Room or in the State Dining Room. And more often than not, in that first year and the second year, he would engage at least a little bit.

Now that we’re in an election year, there are fewer opportunities for access to President Biden. All of his events have invited guests, and most of the time, as soon as he’s done talking, they will push a button and start playing “Hail to the Chief,” volume 100. So even if there weren’t all these guests in between us at the press riser and the microphone, there’s music playing. And so he’s very rarely going to hear a question from the press.

Campaign folks have talked about this. It is part of their strategy. They want quality over quantity. But it has been a change this year, and it makes every chance that we get with the president so much more precious. And he does make a lot of news when he decides to stick around at the microphone. A couple weeks ago, the day that the special counsel’s report came out, I got to ask him about the line that’s in there where Robert Hur says, “He’s a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” I asked him, “How bad is your memory?” And he said, “My memory is so bad I let you speak.” Which is a funny line that also makes news. And so, he can do it. The staff just seems like it wants to really limit it in an election year.

Are you having a harder time getting answers from his people, too?

One of the big challenges is talking about the election. Half the story is Donald Trump, but officials here at the White House, from the podium and in their official capacity, have an escape hatch because of the Hatch Act. and they can say, “Can’t talk about an election. Can’t talk about Donald Trump. He is a candidate in the election. What else do you want to know?” Luckily, the Biden campaign folks in Wilmington are very good and they are very responsive when we have questions and that is very helpful this cycle. But we still do need to know what President Biden himself is thinking about a lot of these things, and he is here at the White House. That’s why it’s so important to get to him.

In fact, two or three weeks ago, I was the TV pool in the Oval Office and it was the first day of the Trump trial in New York. I think maybe it was jury selection. And I asked Biden if he was watching any of the Trump trial and he just shook his head, “no” with a smile. And really, in a transcript, if you look, that’s nothing. But we’ll take what we can get.

Do you collaborate with other journalists in the White House briefing room to get tough questions in? I’ve heard that you all sometimes game it together, especially if you feel like they’re not going to get to what you want. Is that true?

That is true. When it is going to be a very, very small pool because we’re going to be in a small space like the Roosevelt Room or the Oval Office, the thought has become that President Biden is more likely to engage on at least one topic if people aren’t shouting over each other and he can hear one clear question. It seems like the results have been mixed with that. But in terms of my relationship with the other reporters, they have relied on me from time to time to be the one person, I think mostly because of my height and the volume of my voice.

Other reporters say to you, “Hey, you’re the tallest one here, you’ve got to ask this one question”?

It’s more who wants to go first, in hopes that everybody is going to get a question eventually, if it’s limited to four or five people going into the room. It’s who wants to go first with a question that he can clearly hear, and then who wants to go second. When it’s a larger group of press, it’s like the Wild West, and that is truly when people are shouting over each other and I just have to hope that I am shouting the loudest.

You weren’t there for the transition from Trump to Biden, but I was trying to figure out what that transition must’ve been like, and I came across this quote from April Ryan. She said, “It’s a breath of fresh air to not have people personally attacked on a regular basis.” Would you say that that’s been your experience?

There have definitely been some exchanges that can at least come across on TV as very heated. But from the president himself on down, the folks here have been good about touching base afterward to make sure that there are no hard feelings.

Are you referencing Biden’s hot-mic moment when he called you a “stupid son of a bitch”?

That was one of them.

Can you walk me through that moment from your perspective? What were you thinking when you heard that?

I didn’t actually hear it happen. I was at this event for the economic competition council and everything was so very COVID-heavy, but at the time I had a couple of questions about crime. The Ukraine war was bubbling up and somebody yelled to him about Ukraine. He essentially said, “I’m not going to take any questions off-topic.” I didn’t have any economic questions handy, but I had heard somebody say something about inflation. So I asked him, “Do you think inflation is a political liability ahead of the midterms?”

That’s it. They’re ushering us out: “Press, you got to go, the meeting has to continue, you have to go.” They take us down the stairs and at some point, in the bowels of the basement of the White House, my phone lost cell signal, which it does at different places on campus. And I walked back into the door toward my little workspace, which is the door to the briefing room. And there were some reporters there looking at a pool note from the broadcast and somebody said, “Oh Peter, he called you an SOB.” I’m thinking, What? Who? I didn’t hear anything. I still hadn’t seen the clip. And then I went down to the desk that I sit at, which is in the basement of the press area, and my wife had sent me a text. She said, “Is this you? Was he talking to you?” And I was so puzzled. And then I saw the pool note and I saw the clip.

I immediately got a call from The Five. They wanted me to come up and react to it, which I did. And I remember—I think it was Dana Perino—asked me during the broadcast if anybody from the White House had called, and I said, “I don’t think anybody’s going to call,” because until that point, after years of being on the Biden beat and some pretty heated exchanges on the campaign trail about various things, I had not heard from him on the phone directly. But sure enough, about half an hour after I said I didn’t think a call was coming, my phone rang and somebody asked if I had time to talk to the president. He told me “It was nothing personal, pal.” And we had a nice chat for a few minutes.

Can you say anything else about you chatted about?

I told him in the call, “Mr. President, I am still going to always try to ask questions that nobody else is asking about.” And he laughed and he said, “You’ve got to.”

You’ve previously said, about Biden’s first press secretary, Jen Psaki, that “it never feels like I’m getting smacked down or vice versa.” Would you say the same thing about Karine Jean-Pierre?

Yeah, I would. Her job is to defend the president, and my job is to try to figure out how they can either explain or justify certain positions. She can push back as hard as she wants about a topic or about the way that I ask a question, but there’s always going to be a follow-up. And to her credit, there are no topics that they say that they won’t touch that I can remember, with the exception of election stuff because of the Hatch Act. But everything policy-wise or Biden-wise, they’re good about answering.

Do you have any mixed feelings about how people characterize your interactions with Karine basically as combative clashes? Fox News sometimes frames them that way.

No. People can call them whatever they want. I am very confident every day when I go into the briefing room with my questions. If they watch my questions, her answers, I think people will actually learn something that can help them make up their mind about how they want to vote in November. So I know that they get characterized different ways by left-leaning outlets and by right-leaning outlets, but I’m very confident in the questions and the news that they make.

Can I ask about your dad, Steve Doocy? Donald Trump, who praised him in the past, recently called him “an unwatchable RINO.” Can you explain what’s happening here?

I don’t think my dad’s approach has changed at all the whole time that he’s been doing the show, and I pay as close attention as anybody. When I was starting out in this job, I looked at how he prepared as a broadcaster and the approach that he took, and it’s always been very, very helpful to me. I have not noticed anything. When he is getting ready, he is basically trying to communicate to the American people either things that he thinks are interesting or things that the butcher at Market Basket told him about a big news story. And I don’t think that that has changed.

It could be that this time next year you’re dealing with a Trump press secretary. Do you expect that to be very different?

Different how?

Well, one of Trump’s previous officials, Kash Patel, recently said that Trump will “criminally and civilly” go after his foes in the media.

My role and my approach would not change at all. In fact, I was in Iowa right around the time of the Democratic primaries and caucuses in January 2020. I had already interviewed every major Democratic candidate. Trump was doing a counterprogramming rally, and I reached out to see if Trump had a couple minutes for an interview, because then that way we would’ve talked to everybody. He agreed, and I asked him about the stuff that allegedly really annoys him. At the time, somebody asked Michael Bloomberg, “Is the country ready for another race between two New York billionaires?” And Bloomberg said, “Who’s the other one?” I asked Trump about that and he had an answer and we made a lot of news. I think I was the second person to ever ask him on camera about COVID. And so I think the approach would be the same that I have with this president, where you want to know how exactly they’re approaching a huge news story, but you also want to know how they feel about the stuff that people are talking about.

Does the Trump “enemy of the people” rhetoric scare you at all?

To be honest, I truly am so consumed with all things Biden. I haven’t seen every single thing that Trump has said. But I would say if he reached the White House, I would expect him to have the same approach as last time where he wants to be the face and the voice of all of these administration policies. I would expect him still to look for opportunities to be out there talking about everything every day, just because that’s how he approached it last time. And so I think the big difference would be Donald Trump wants to be his own spokesman. He thinks that he is his best spokesman, and that was a 2020 to 2024 way of looking at things, whereas President Biden takes a traditional approach. He might set the agenda privately, but he wants professional communicators out there as the face and the voice of these policies.

Have you had to fight to separate yourself from the opinion side of Fox at all?

I am not here in this job to be best friends with anybody in the West Wing, but I’m also not trying to make things more personal or nasty than they have to be. I have seen people take that approach, and I don’t think it really yields better results, in my opinion. I am overwhelmingly, I think, known as being an affable guy, but I’ve shown the president and his team that I’ll always be standing next to the camera with a question. And they could have stopped calling on me a long time ago, but they haven’t. The fact that there are so few events with President Biden is a separate issue, but they could have decided that they don’t want to engage us at all. And it doesn’t seem like they’ve decided that. And so that’s pretty much my entire approach in a nutshell, in terms of separating myself from a different department or from others. It’s really not something I think about.

Do you think that Biden is hiding away? Do you think that they are hiding him away?

I think you can just look at the schedule and look at how many interesting things about current events you’ve heard him say this year and it’s way fewer than his first year, his second year, and most of the third year. It’s just less and less. And so it seems like it is probably something the folks in Wilmington want as part of an election year. And it’s possible that they change course, and they go to the convention and the polls haven’t turned around and suddenly it’s like, “Oh boy, we’ve got to get this guy out there a bunch more.” And maybe it’ll work, maybe it’ll be too late. Don’t know.

It is tough because he, for those first couple years, I remember almost every event that he would give remarks at in the East Room, in the State Dining Room, he would stay at the mic and listen for a question and he would engage multipart questions all the time. And I think he really likes having the chance to do that.

When you put him like that, he doesn’t sound so “sleepy.”

You said it! I think about this often because we see so little of the president. Right after my paternity leave ended last summer, my first day, I flew to New Mexico for an event with President Biden and there wasn’t a ton of press there. And pretty much all press had left and I was just hanging on the press riser and I was trying to get the president’s attention. I waved to him and he waved me over and the Secret Service told me that I could jump over a bike rack. And I went up and I asked him a question about some congressional testimony and he didn’t like the question, but he answered it and then he walked away. And John Kirby said he did an interview the next day and he said to Martha MacCallum, “The president knows Peter’s not going to ask some softball question about how his vacation was.” And I think the president should get some credit for that, where he’s got Secret Service and he’s got control of the drone fleet. They could get rid of me they wanted to.

Word? That’s terrifying.

No, no, no. That was meant as a joke!