Charles Barkley Goes Viral After Taking Hilarious Jab At Joe Biden

Former NBA star Charles Barkley made himself laugh and drew an unsurprisingly subdued response from his fellow hosts when, during a recent broadcast of TNT’s “Inside the NBA,” he made a joke about the idiocy of the average voter and the president.

Speaking about whether fans should be allowed to vote for who will be on All Star teams, Barkley said “We let the fans vote. Look what happened last time they got to vote for president.” Watch that here:

Charles Barkley: "We let the fans vote. Look what happened last time they got to vote for president." 😅pic.twitter.com/cEIFy2fgyK

— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPoints) January 27, 2023

Fact check: true. The Barkley comment carries with it much the same attitude as the apocryphal Churchill quote about democracy, which is “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Given that Biden is president, Churchill sure should have said that if he didn’t.

In any case, Barkley’s anti-Biden comment drew a muted, awkward response from his co-host, Adam Lefkoe, who wasn’t quite sure what to say.

Chuckling awkwardly to himself, Lefkoe said “alright” and, a few chuckles later, “hey now.” He then tried to get on track with what he was saying, talking about the upcoming game and saying “Uh. Mavs/Suns is going to be our late game tonight. It’s going to be Luka against Charles’ Suns. The Suns are on a four…”

But then both Barkley and Shaquel O’Neill started laughing to themselves and Lefkoe had to stop again, saying “Man, you’re really giving it to me tonight.”

Unfortunately, Barkley then clarified his remark and said he was referring not to the most recent presidential election, where voters chose Joe Biden, but rather the one before, where they chose Trump. Making that point, Barkley said “I don’t mean the old guy, I mean the guy before the old guy. Sorry, President Biden…”

However, given the amount of time before he “clarified” that, some thought he really meant Biden and was just trying to cover his tracks for fear of getting canceled by the left. One person on Twitter, commenting on the above video, for example, said “Chuck had to lie because Chuck knows society today can’t handle a joke and is afraid of getting cancelled lol.”

Whoever he was referring to, Barkley is at least less woke than the average athlete. Back during the chaos that followed George Floyd’s death, he hammered sports as turning into a woke circus, saying “I think we’re missing the point. We need police reform, we need prison reform. … My concern is turning this into a circus instead of trying to do some good stuff.”

Continuing, he went on to add that what America really needs is “good cops out there policing the bad cops.”

He also argued that sports need to get away from divisive political issues and return to being an escape from all that unpleasantness, saying, “sports used to be a place where fans could go get away from reality.”

By: Will Tanner. Follow me on Twitter @Will_Tanner_1