President Joe Biden sought once again to quell fears about his age and fitness, following the conclusion of the NATO summit, with a lengthy press conference in which he touted his accomplishments and took open questions from the press, at several times fielding questions about whether he really had the ability to campaign for a second term.
Apart from a couple of gaffes, like calling Vice President Kamala Harris "Vice President Trump" in the first answer, Biden largely held it together and gave decisive, clear answers. And he contrasted his own fitness to Trump's, noting he has been in policy meetings and campaign events nonstop for two weeks, while former President Donald Trump is “riding around on his golf cart filling out his scorecard before he hits the ball.”
Commenters on social media broadly seemed to agree it was a better performance than the disastrous debate with Trump in Atlanta last month — but their fears about his fitness, or his ability to convince wavering voters, were by no means entirely put to bed.
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"So far this is a very similar Goldilocks performance to Biden's ABC News interview: not bad enough to open the floodgates, but not good enough to silence the critics," wrote National Journal Hotline's Kirk Bado. "A frustrating spot for Dems."
"Biden has actual been pretty good at this presser. I’m not sure it will help all that much," wrote MSNBC columnist Michael A. Cohen.
"This entire tone is like your Boomer boss being all aw shucks folks at a meeting about one of your coworkers dying in a freak electric fire," wrote San Francisco-based anti-Trump activist Armand Domalewski.
"The notion Biden is out of it or doesn’t govern effectively is dead wrong. On top of his material," wrote Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. "The question is whether he can convince people he can win."
"Every performance Biden gives now is a put-out-the-fire moment for his campaign," wrote FiveThirtyEight political data analyst G. Elliott Morris. "It is not enough for him to not make things worse, he needs to completely extinguish the wildfire of elected Dems calling on him to step down. Maybe this isn’t debate-lvl terrible but it ain’t enough."
"Nothing about Biden this evening implies he’s prepared to stand aside," wrote political scientist Ian Bremmer. "But much more pressure from his party is coming."
"Putting aside all the figure skating judge elements of this and the arm-chair doctoring, the thing that I find the most frustrating is that there continues to be no clear message," wrote former GOP operative Tim Miller. "What is the Biden v. Trump elevator pitch. What's the contrast message? Hitting Trump for just golfing all day is fine. But there's just so much to work with re: Trump and much of it is MIA."
