The Many Faces of Joe Biden’s First Press Conference

There is much to criticize in the substance of Joe Biden’s first press conference as president, including his egregious abandonment of his prior defenses of the Senate filibuster, his lies about the situation at the border, his kicking the can down the road again on Afghanistan, his effort to wave away the existence of the Republican Party, and his effort to embrace transparency while flatly telling reporters that they would see border facilities only when he felt he had improved their conditions. And that’s before you even get to him claiming that Republican voting bills would dwarf Jim Crow. But one cannot pass over the visual aspect of Biden’s presentation.

To start with, unlike Donald Trump’s frequent outdoor gaggles — a bar that ought to be a pretty low one, especially if you loathed Trump — Biden was in a sparsely populated room indoors, to which he arrived ten minutes late:

Biden was, as per his practice on the trail, visibly reading off a pre-screened list of whose questions he would take — at one point, trying to get to who he had listed to go next, he said aloud, “Okay, where am I here?”:

Then, he went to a notebook as he answered questions:

There was a lot of leaning forward to try to hear the questions:

Here we have the face Biden made when he had to stop himself in the middle of a sentence because he just got confused and said the wrong thing (later in the press conference, he simply abandoned an answer in the middle of another sentence, not even bothering to finish it, when it was apparent that he had lost his train of thought):

The most surreal moment of the press conference came when Yamiche Alcindor asked a “question” about how immigrants who had stayed away during Trump’s presidency were coming to America because they had heard that Biden is such “a moral man.” You can watch the progression of Biden’s facial expressions listening to this as it dawned on even him that he needed to run in the opposite direction from Alcindor’s premise that he was a magnet for illegal immigrants:

Biden went back to his notes again while casting about for an answer to that one:

There was a lot of this expression:

Biden got a question on North Korea that he obviously knew was coming, and read off what was plainly a prepared statement:

There were, however, a few glimpses of the old Joe Biden, grinning smugly at questions he didn’t think he needed to take seriously:

And with one more review of the notes, Biden was done:

It may be the case that the American political media overrates a president’s ability to think quickly on his feet and talk extemporaneously about a broad range of issues without notes. Certainly, several past Republican presidents got broiled over any hint that they needed to screen questions or read from notes, or were less than verbally precise. Ronald Reagan, perhaps because of his reputation as “the Great Communicator” and certainly due to his age (nine years younger than Biden when he started the job), faced a constant game of “gotcha” at press conferences where the media aimed to show that he was unprepared and out of his depth. What is clear enough, watching Biden, is that he requires an awful lot of careful stage management just to make it through a handful of questions. And he’s only had the job for two months.