Name: Biden's first press conference was a revealing piece of reality TV
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Biden's first press conference was a revealing piece of reality TV 

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Joe Biden carried off his first press conference with his customary dynamism on Thursday afternoon. It wasn’t a real press conference, but it was a revealing piece of reality television. Biden campaigned as a return to normality. But this episode from a slo-mo Truman Show is anything but.&nbsp;The number of questioners was restricted, ostensibly due to Covid-19 regulations. The questions were known in advance: on Thursday morning, Americans with nothing better to do could read in newspapers and on websites which journalist was going to ask what question.Biden knew what was coming. He even knew the sequence of the questions. We watched as he slowly ummed and aahed his way out of one question and into the next, looking for the list of journalists’ names as heThere were four conservatives among the thirty reporters. Biden took a question from the Wall Street Journal but, somehow, Fox News, Newsmax and Sinclair weren’t on his dance card.&nbsp;Some of the questions were base flattery, but a few hit home. You could tell when they had: Biden didn’t answer the question, but slipped into one of his default mode, mostly misty reveries about the past, with sudden and inappropriate outbursts of anger.Asked about human rights in China, he ducked his head and slurred through a prepared script. Asked about his promise to tighten the gun laws, he delivered a rheumy soliloquy about infrastructure. He blamed Donald Trump for the humanitarian crisis on the southern border, and described Trump’s policies as his own. He agreed that the Senate filibuster was “a relic of Jim Crow”, then shrugged about getting rid of it and shouted that the Republicans were “sick, sick”.Press conferences are one of the phenomena that the historian Daniel J. Boorstin called “pseudo-events”. They are staged to look like news, but their real purpose is to attract and distract the media. Trump made the press conference the real event by giving it his utmost. Biden, by his absence from the ritual, made the press conference into the news in his own way. And now his inept surrender to the ritual will become the plotline of the new series.Trump raised the hollow trick of the press conference to a minor art. He enjoyed the back-and-forth, and he accelerated the exchanges like a boxer. Trump wasn’t afraid of a roomful of almost entirely hostile journalists. Biden’s team are afraid of a roomful of almost entirely friendly journalists. They don’t trust him to hold a conversation on an open mike. It’s not hard to see why.Asked about the Democratic left’s proposals to dispense with the filibuster, Biden freestyled, and broke out into exuberant gibberish:“I have never been poor at calculating how to get things done in the United States Senate periods of the best way to get something done, if you hold near and dear to you that you like to be able to… anyway.”His head dropped, as if he was looking for a cue card that wasn’t there. “We are ready to get a lot done,” he said after a pause, his voice low and pleading, “and if we have to, if there is a complete lockdown and chaos as a result of the filibuster, then we’ll have to go beyond what I’m talking about. Okay, hang on… uh… sorry.”The transcript is about as exciting as a pinocle tournament in a seniors’ home, but the drama of Biden’s delivery is gripping. He can spin out at any moment. Even on a good day, he gets a faraway look in his eyes. Or he simply goes quiet in the middle of a sentence with a look of a man who’s realising that he’s eaten something funny.Biden waited 64 days, the longest span in modern Presidential history, If his absence had only occasioned a chorus of ridicule and outrage from the right, he might never had held one at all: the Democrats regard conservative media and the Republicans as Marie Antoinette regarded the peasants.It was the grumbling from the left that forced him onto the dais on Thursday. He scraped by, for now. Soon, he’ll have to undergo another ordeal by camera. Sooner or later, he’ll fail to meet it, however soft the questions are and however much he reads from cue cards. And then “uh… sorry” won’t cut it – not with Xi, not with Putin, and not with Kamala Harris.We were told that reality television politics was over when Trump left office, but they’re not. Biden’s torture is this season’s plotline. The twist will be that it’ll be the Democrats who pull the plug. They’ll give him a cue card for that too.Related TopicsThe Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our.You need to be a subscriber to join the conversation. Find out more.Show commentsAdvertisementRelated TopicsWe rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism.We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future.Thank you for your support.Need help?Visit ourpage.Close

Joe Biden carried off his first press conference with his customary dynamism on Thursday afternoon. It wasn’t a real press conference, but it was a revealing piece of reality television. Biden campaigned as a return to normality. But this episode from a slo-mo Truman Show is anything but.&nbsp;The number of questioners was restricted, ostensibly due to Covid-19 regulations. The questions were known in advance: on Thursday morning, Americans with nothing better to do could read in newspapers and on websites which journalist was going to ask what question.Biden knew what was coming. He even...

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Dominic Green

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Biden's first press conference was a revealing piece of reality TV

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