At Biden’s high-stakes press conference, the trouble began when the teleprompter turned off

Since his disastrous debate performance, the president’s campaign has been in crisis. Tonight’s ‘big boy’ press conference will not have put it back on track, Richard Hall writes

In his first press conference for eight months, Biden confused his running-mate, Kamala Harris, with his mortal enemy, Donald Trump (Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

The trouble began as soon as the teleprompter was turned off.

Just two weeks after a disastrous debate plunged his campaign into crisis, and with heavy hitters in his own party refusing to publicly support him, Joe Biden’s performance needed to be flawless.

But in his first answer, to the first question, at his first open press conference in eight months, he confused his running-mate, Kamala Harris, with his mortal enemy, Donald Trump.

“I wouldn’t have picked vice president Trump to be vice president if I didn’t think she was qualified to be president,” he said, without correcting himself.

That might not have drawn so much attention if he hadn’t confused president Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine with his mortal enemy, Russian president Vladimir Putin, just hours earlier.

On the scale of presidential gaffes, they landed somewhere between George H. W. Bush vomiting in the Japanese prime minister’s lap at a banquet and a break-in at the Watergate Hotel.

This was billed by the White House as a “big boy” press conference — a demonstration of the president’s mental strength after so many doubts. That such a description could be given to a routine part of a president’s job is a sign of how low the bar has been set for Biden following that catastrophic 90 minutes on stage with Trump in Atlanta.

As bad as the CNN debate was, it wasn’t quite enough to seal his fate. Fourteen Democratic congressmen and one senator have publicly called for him to step down by Thursday evening, but many were waiting for something more.

Biden’s faltering appearances have made physicians out of all of us. We use terms like “cognitive decline” and spew multiple diagnoses at the screen every time he speaks. That is doubly true for his fellow party members.

Tonight, they were hoping for something conclusive.

Some may have wished for a fatal error that would make their decision to call on him to step down easier, while his friends and close aides were hoping for perfection. What happened was the worst of both worlds: a purgatory in between. Something very pedestrian, even boring.

His answers to simple questions were often rambling and trailed off. He would catch himself sometimes, ending a sentence abruptly with the word “anyway…”

Even on the occasions when he offered substantive answers, they seemed to last so long that the question was a distant memory.

In fending off questions about his age, Biden boasted about the size of his schedule the way Trump boasts about his crowd sizes. “Where’s Trump right now? In his golf cart filling out a scorecard before he hits the ball. I mean, look, he’s done virtually nothing,” he said.

Biden did not dodge the doubters but he likely also didn’t do enough to quell them. In one unguarded moment, he blamed his aides for adding things to his schedule all the time.

“I love my staff, but they add things, add things, all the time. I’m catching hell from my wife for that,” he said.

Biden has spent much of his presidency hiding from the full glare of the media. He has held fewer press conferences and media interviews than any of the last seven presidents at the same point in their terms. His last solo press conference, at which he took five questions from reporters, was eight months ago.

His close coterie of aides has carefully managed his public appearances to avoid any slip-ups. They have even managed his work behind closed doors, turning cabinet meetings into “orchestrated” affairs with pre-arranged questions.

That bubble was burst two weeks ago, and Biden’s campaign has been in crisis ever since. His performance at this “big boy” press conference will not be enough to crush the dissenters, nor will it be enough to open the floodgates.