I was at Biden’s ‘big boy’ press conference. It was stage-managed to a fault

Under-the-breath groans were heard when Biden accidentally referred to Kamala Harris as ‘Vice President Trump’

Just hours before the ‘big boy’ press conference that was intended to reassure us all, President Joe Biden made a catastrophic mistake. Inviting Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, to the stage at a NATO event, he accidentally referred to him as “President Putin”. It was a nail-biting moment and groans could be heard in the room as it happened. Biden’s seconds-later excuse — that he was just “so focused about beating Putin” while he was talking that he slipped up — was hardly reassuring.

Hours later, The Independent joined a small number of reporters allowed to attend the hour-long press conference on Thursday night. The White House had asked us to RSVP in advance, presumably to filter through names, and I only received confirmation that I could actually attend on Thursday morning. Planned for 5.30pm, we then received emails letting us know the presser was delayed — first by an hour, then a little longer. In the end, it didn’t start until after 7pm.

President Joe Biden departs after speaking at a news conference following the NATO Summit in Washington, Thursday, July 11, 2024 (AP)

And then the president opened by making the same kind of mistake he’d committed with Zelensky hours before.

Biden spoke mostly from a teleprompter for the ‘big boy’ press conference, only going off-script when reporters posed questions. Early on, he concluded some remarks delivered from that prepared, teleprompter-borne script about the success of the NATO summit and the strength of the 75-year-old alliance by allowing a question about Vice President Kamala Harris’s qualifications.

“I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to serve,” he said, if he didn’t think she was qualified. It was an awkward moment; this time, the groans were subdued — a couple under people’s breaths, but not much more.

Normally, as a reporter attending a press conference, one sits in a densely packed scrum with other journalists from varied publications, and one raises their hand and tries to get the speaker’s attention. The speaker points, you ask your question, you hopefully get an answer.

But it became clear that Thursday night wasn’t going to be that sort of press conference within minutes of entering the room.

White House press office staffers moved reporters around, making sure certain journalists were near the aisles or the outer ends of the rows of seats.

And sure enough, despite the promise of a “big boy” press conference, Biden — the man who can single-handedly order a nuclear strike that could snuff out millions in an instant — called the names of those his assistants had picked out for him. The usually much more free and open style of a White House press conference was transformed: things felt extremely choreographed.

After Biden finished speaking, one TV correspondent with a booming voice was able to get him to address the fact that he’d mixed up Harris and Trump earlier. But White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre quickly took up a microphone to cut off any other reporter’s effort to ask him anything else.

For the most part, however, it’s fair to say that Biden delivered a one-hour, four-minute performance on Thursday night that was unremarkable, in a good way.

He responded to detailed foreign policy questions with equally detailed answers that went on for minutes at a time, demonstrating a command of facts one would expect from a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and ex-vice president.

Biden also defiantly continued to say he will be staying in the presidential race, and told another reporter who asked about his cognitive status that his doctors have seen no reason for him to undergo any more neurological exams than the three he has already taken since entering the White House.

At the end of the event, when The Independent noted to a White House press office staffer that Biden’s press conference had been “choreographed,” she responded that that view of the conference was “negative.”

The last time Joe Biden made even a token effort to appear as if he was taking questions from the entire White House press corps was 610 days ago, in 2022. That was just days after Republicans had taken control of the House of Representatives and ended the Democrats’ unified control over Washington.

Nearly two years later, this highly-touted question-and-answer session was meant to prove that Biden is still up to the rigors of a campaign by holding the sort of freewheeling back-and-forth with reporters that Trump has engaged in on multiple occasions. The more controlled and stage-managed interactions that have characterized his presidency just aren’t going to cut it any more.

But if Biden’s job was to convince voters and skeptical Democrats in Congress that he’s still up for running and winning against Trump a second time, the deluge of statements calling for his withdrawal within moments of the press conference ending is a strong indicator that he didn’t pull it off.

Nevertheless, the fact that the president mainly held his own for over an hour marks this out as one of the lesser disasters of the past two and a half weeks.