Biden vows to stay in race despite blunders at news conference

When the special counsel investigating him described Joe Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the U.S. president was indignant, but botched his response by getting Mexico and Egypt mixed up. This past Thursday, about an hour before appearing at a press conference that had become a cognitive ability test, Biden introduced the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as “President Putin” at an event at the NATO summit in Washington. And so the news conference started off on the wrong foot. In the first question he took from the press, he called Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump.” Even so, the president continues to insist that he is the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump and that he will run for re-election. “I think I’m the best qualified person to do the job,” he said.

“I’m not in this for my legacy. I’m in this to complete the job I started,” he said at the beginning of the press conference. Near the end, he added that the only thing age does is bring a little wisdom. In between, there was not the slightest concession to the possibility of withdrawing from the race. Biden noted that other presidents were worse off than he was in their bid for re-election, that he doesn’t believe the polls that show Trump winning, and that there is a lot of campaigning ahead. He theoretically left open the possibility that delegates at the Democratic convention in Chicago could vote for another candidate, but neither the rules make it easy, nor does he believe it will happen.

The president emerged relatively unscathed from the news conference, but it is hard to see how his performance will dispel the doubts of not just American voters but also the more critical members of his own Democratic Party. Some of them are looking for the least traumatic way of convincing Biden to give up the re-election bid. The press conference started with a delay of almost an hour. The White House gave an unexpected image of disorganization and improvisation. And the longer the event was delayed, the more times television stations replayed Biden’s “President Putin” blunder, amplifying its effect. At the same time, the delay fueled speculation that the president might preparing to announce his withdrawal from the race.

During his speech, he underscored the fall in inflation, one of the issues that has hurt his popularity throughout his term in office. On Thursday it emerged that prices fell in June for the first time in four years. Biden went on to say that his measures to secure the southern border have seen arrests for illegal crossings fall by more than half in recent weeks. And then he defended his policy in Gaza.

After a speech of just over seven minutes, he gave way to questions. There were 11 of them, and he answered them over the course of 50 minutes. The first was about his decision to run for re-election and the ability of his vice president, Kamala Harris, to replace him if required. And that is when he made his second big gaffe of the evening, calling Harris “Vice President Trump.” The Republican presumptive nominee was quick to make fun of him: “Great job, Joe!” he wrote on Truth Social. Biden hit back on X: “By the way: Yes, I know the difference. One’s a prosecutor, and the other’s a felon.”

There were a couple of other slip-ups, such as when he got Europe and Asia mixed up, but for the most part Biden waded through the journalists’ questions relatively well, although perhaps he went in too deep with foreign policy disquisitions that did not reach the average citizen. He made it clear throughout that he remains firmly in the race, that he will put up a fight and that he aspires to defeat Trump. “I beat him once, and I will beat him again,” he asserted.

The NATO summit has ended as expected, with promises of more military aid to Ukraine, messages of unity, and increasing attention paid to Asia and the Southern flank. It can be considered a success, but on the other hand there been no extraordinary achievements that might allow Biden to appear before American citizens as a great statesman.

Joe Biden has been trying for two weeks to undo the terrible impression he gave at the CNN debate against Donald Trump in Atlanta. That day, the president of the United States confirmed the worst fears of those who considered that, at 81 years old, he is not in the best shape to be re-elected and head the leading world power for four more years.

Biden gave an interview with ABC News last week that he had touted, along with yesterday’s news conference, as a chance to prove his critics wrong. While the interview was not as disastrous as the debate, the president had trouble completing some of his sentences. Meanwhile, it has emerged that two other interviews he gave to radio stations had been a kind of pantomime in which the White House had facilitated the questions and suggested editing the answers.

By the time Thursday’s news conference came around, the bar had been lowered to the point where the real issue was whether the president would be capable of answering a few questions without screwing up, which is almost like conceding defeat. In this sense, a Democratic congressman, Adam Smith, told The Wall Street Journal: “I mean really, we’re having a serious conversation about, you know, can our candidate get through a press conference? The mere fact that we’re having that conversation at this point in the campaign sort of tells you everything you need to know about what needs to be done.”

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