Fox News host Harris Faulkner offered rare praise for President Biden for his remarks at a memorial service Tuesday for a Capitol Police officer who died in an attack on Capitol Hill earlier this month.
The officer, William “Billy” Evans, died on April 2 when a man rammed his car into a Senate-side security checkpoint, crashing into Evans and another officer at the gate.
“My prayer for all of you is that a day will come when you have that memory and you smile before you bring a tear to your eyes,” Biden said while speaking to the family of Evans in attendance at the memorial service in the Capitol Rotunda on Tuesday. “I promise you it’s going to come. It just takes a while.”
Faulkner, who anchored Fox News’s coverage of the service, described Biden’s words as those “of kindness and empathy like he does so well.”
“He is iconic at it,” she said. “He is so present and so kind.”
“Consoler in chief is a role that every president unfortunately plays in America,” Faulkner later said. “We watched this moment of grief, and we feel for the family and we understand the sacrifice because we have watched it play out. We know the meaning of law enforcement in our lives, particularly at the U.S. Capitol.”
Biden lost his first wife and his young daughter as the result of a car crash in 1972. His son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015. Last year, footage of Biden consoling the family of a victim of a mass shooting at Parkland High School went viral.
Evans’s casket will lie in the Capitol Rotunda until Sunday evening.