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

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 stop 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