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

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.

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