Jen Psaki derides Fox reporter for suggesting Joe Biden is scared of Vladimir Putin

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki derided a Fox News reporter’s suggestion that President Joe Biden is “intimidated” by Russian President Vladimir Putin, which the Fox reporter responded to by saying that gas prices prove that Biden is scared.

Fox’s Peter Doocy spent his questions at the White House press briefing yesterday trying to make Biden’s stance against the Russian invasion of Ukraine a negative for Democrats.

Related: Jen Psaki slams Donald Trump’s effusive praise of Vladimir Putin

“The President said before he got here that ‘Putin knows, if I am President of the United States, his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over,'” Doocy said. Biden has been president for a little over a year.

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“It’s two and a half years later. He is intimidating the United States and those in Eastern Europe. What happened?”

“I’d hardly put it that way,” Psaki responded. “I would look at it, actually, from the prism of, the United States and President Biden has rallied the world, rallied Europe to stand up against the efforts and the actions of President Putin.”

To drive home the point that Biden is, in fact, intimidated, Doocy brought up gas prices.

“You don’t think people who are totally strapped for cash right now are intimidated by $4 gas, $5 gas, however high you guys think it’s going to go? Something like that is not intimidating?”

It’s not clear what the connection was, and apparently Psaki couldn’t understand it either.

“You asked me if we were intimidated by President Putin, and I think the evidence of that doesn’t exist,” she responded succinctly before moving on to the next question.

Before the above exchange, Doocy tried to use the invasion of Ukraine to show that liberals are wrong to be concerned about global warming.

“The president said in the spring that Pentagon generals had briefed him that the greatest threat facing America is global warming,” Doocy asked. “Is that still the assessment now that we are facing down a potential cyber war with Russia?”

Psaki pointed out that the U.S. isn’t currently worried about a “cyber war” with Russia before reminding Doocy that it was the military that made the report that he asked about, not the White House.

“While we are always prepared for any threat that any outside entity or country poses to the United States as it relates to cyber or anything else, there is no current pending threat on, as it relates to cyber,” she said.

“In terms of the threats you’re touching on, that was a briefing from the military, so I’d point you to them.”