The U.S. presidential election has reached new heights of absurdity, reminding us all of Darren Rovell’s viral 2016 post: “I feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has been a meme the entire presidency, moving from “We did it, Joe,” to her obsession with venn diagrams to her being “unburdened by what has been.” But the meme intensity reached its boiling point in the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s worrisomely poor performance at the first presidential debate against former President Donald Trump. The debate left many constituents worried about either candidate’s ability to run a country at their big age.
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This comes at a time at which Biden was already struggling to hold onto young voters, particularly the more digitally vocal of the cohort. After the debate, Harris outperformed Biden in a poll on CNN. We learned that Biden would be condensing his schedule in order to get more sleep. People — Republicans, Democrats, George Clooney — started wondering if Biden would stop running for president and, instead, pass the torch to Harris. If he were to do that, we all thought, he would tell us at his most recent press conference on Thursday, July 11.
The conference, set on the final day of the NATO Summit in Washington, was a clear attempt to reassure voters that he is still fit to be the president for the next four years, despite that June 27 presidential debate and also being 81 years old.
It did not go well. This is probably not something to laugh about, but if you want to know what happened in the least intense way, might I introduce you to shitposts on X?
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Biden wasn’t starting off particularly strong. Earlier in the day, he mistakenly referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin.”
So he wasn’t headed into the press conference with the highest standing. It was supposed to start at 6:30, but the hour came and went. He didn’t get on stage until 7:30, which, as we know, is dangerously close to his bedtime.
He gave a speech about the NATO conference and repeatedly focused on his successes there, highlighting the U.S.’s involvement in the war between Ukraine and Russia. After his speech, he took questions and immediately fumbled. Hard. He called Vice President Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump.”
For the fans counting at home, that’s two pretty huge name mixups in less than 24 hours.
Then Biden did his typical, horrifying whisper thing he does. He says “guess what” and then says something like “it grows the economy.” It should be noted that while it always isn’t great, during this presser, it was super weird.
In the end, the press conference didn’t seem to have the desired effect. While Biden confirmed over and over again that he would be running as the Democratic nominee for president, most people found it disheartening. David Frum called it “heartbreaking” in The Atlantic. Fred Kaplan pointed out in Slate that Biden had a pretty successful NATO conference, which has been completely overshadowed by his little blunders; blunders that might not necessarily mean anything about his mental fitness, but certainly don’t instill confidence.
And the posters… they didn’t cut him any breaks.
