By the time Joe Biden took the stage on Thursday evening, almost an hour late, for his first solo news conference in eight months, it was hard to imagine what the President could say that would satisfy nervous Democrats who are wondering whether he needs to pull the plug on his reëlection campaign: I’m sorry? I’m going to do better? I quit? He didn’t say any of those things, of course. Though maybe he should have.
There was a bad whiff about the event well before it began. In the hours leading up to the press conference, more dire news stalked Biden—a Pew Research poll found that seventy-one per cent of Biden’s own voters wanted both him and former President Donald Trump to drop out; a steady drip of Democratic lawmakers was practically begging him to “do the right thing” and step aside; quotes to the press from anonymous Biden aides declared his candidacy all but dead as his approval rating sank to a new low of just under thirty-seven per cent in the FiveThirtyEight average. “He needs to drop out,” one Biden campaign staffer told NBC News. “He will never recover from this.”
The enduring questions about Biden’s advanced age and continued fitness for office certainly weren’t helped by his pre-game gaffe at the final session of NATO’s seventy-fifth-anniversary summit that he’s been hosting in Washington this week. “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin,” he said, while introducing Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky. He quickly caught himself and turned back to the podium to correct his mistake: “President Putin? He’s gonna beat President Putin.” But, coming less than an hour before the press conference, it wasn’t a good omen. And sure enough, Biden was barely into his first response before he let loose another gaffe, arguably even cringier than the first. Asked about Vice-President Kamala Harris and her ability to step in for him if need be, Biden responded by saying, “Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice-President Trump to be Vice-President if I think she was not qualified to be President.” This time, he did not even spot the error.
Possibly, maybe even probably, that is all that anyone will remember about this press conference. One thing we can already say with certainty is that Biden’s performance—shaky but by no means disgraceful—did little to end the political crisis that has threatened to consume his Presidency since his poor showing in a debate with Trump two weeks ago. “The notion that the President is going to be saved by this interview or that press conference misses the forest for trees,” Representative Ritchie Torres, of New York, posted on social media before the press conference had even begun, accusing Biden of a “pattern of denial and self-delusion.” And in fact, minutes after Biden finished, Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, put out a statement calling on him to drop out. “The 2024 election will define the future of American democracy, and we must put forth the strongest candidate possible to confront the threat posed by Trump’s promised MAGA authoritarianism,” it said. “I no longer believe that is Joe Biden, and I hope that, as he has throughout a lifetime of public service, he will continue to put our nation first, and as he promised, make way for a new generation of leaders.” Many more such statements—“dozens,” according to CBS News—were expected to follow.
On Monday, while announcing plans for the Thursday event, Biden’s own communications team had snarkily dubbed it a “big-boy press conference,” alluding to a heated exchange last week with Bloomberg’s Justin Sink, a briefing-room regular who challenged the White House on whether Biden would be made available for a “real, big-boy” exchange with reporters. By the end of the evening, Trump could not resist making a bad joke of it all, taunting Biden in a social-media post for beginning “his ‘Big Boy’ Press Conference” by mixing up Harris’s name with his own. “Great job, Joe!” Trump said.
But, for those who listened to the full hour of Biden’s press conference, it wasn’t, in the end, the gaffe that made this a poor performance. It was Biden’s over-all halting, painful delivery. It was his struggle to find words, and the fact that when he did find them they were often not the right ones. Most important, it was his inability to make the case for himself—and his difficulty prosecuting the case against Trump.
This was nothing like the debacle of the debate, but a quieter sort of fail—that of an eighty-one-year-old who is struggling to stay onstage, who still thinks he has wisdom to impart and a job to finish. Biden insisted on Thursday, as he has before, that he is ready to continue in the world’s hardest job, and he protested when a reporter for the Financial Times suggested he had acknowledged in recent days some limits he might put on the twenty-four-hour-a-day responsibilities of the Presidency. But then he began to elaborate on the limits—a shorter workday, a more disciplined schedule—he ought to put in place. He proceeded to go on about his wife being mad at him for doing too much, about his staff sneaking new events into his already packed calendar. It was a painful answer, an old-man answer. Because it was less of a car crash than the debate, the moment somehow felt even more tragic.
All the more so because Biden is not Trump, whose vigorous projection at his speeches tends to mask their absurdity, incoherence, and flagrant incorrectness. Biden mixes up Putin’s name; Trump actually admires Putin. The current President clearly still knows what he’s talking about; indeed, his eyes lit up toward the end of the press conference when he started talking foreign policy. He did not seem confused. Or dangerous. He digressed. He offered mini-lectures on investing in China, on the need for a new industrial policy in the West, and on the evils of trickle-down economics. But it is not what America needed to hear from him tonight.
“I think it’s important to allay fears,” Biden allowed at one point. But had he done so?
The truth, far easier to see in hindsight, of course, is that Biden’s reëlection campaign has been haunted from the start by the unanswerable question of his age and capacity. Amid the post-debate crisis, I rewatched a press conference from the spring of 2023, delivered during the week when Biden formally announced his bid. He was asked a question—the question, really—about his reason for running, by ABC News’ Mary Bruce: “You’ve said you can beat Trump again. Do you think you’re the only one?” Biden, in a meandering reply, which went on for nearly six hundred words, said that he had “a job to finish, that “I feel good,” that his policies were popular, and that it would be up to the American people “to judge whether or not I have it or don’t have it.”
This unconvincing ramble, it turns out, was not an outlier, any more than his miserable debate performance was. The American public, if not the pundit class, incidentally, has been loud and clear on this: In the summer of 2023, an AP-NORC poll found that seventy-seven per cent of Americans believed Biden was too old to be an effective President, not much different than the eighty-six per cent, per an ABC poll, who thought he was too old in February, 2024. Watching that press conference from last year, the only real difference I found was that Biden looks even older now and sounds even more hesitant.
In other words, Biden and his party do not have a debate problem; they have a Biden problem, which the debate finally forced his party to confront. Thursday night’s press conference showed that the President remains for the most part a man in denial. Again and again, he was asked: Are you still up for the job? Can you go toe-to-toe with world leaders? What is the real state of your health?
He had no satisfying answers. Nancy Pelosi, over to you. ♦