Responding to the first question posed to him during Thursday’s NATO summit press conference, President Joe Biden mistakenly called Vice President Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump,” his second gaffe in just a few hours.
As President Joe Biden began taking questions from reporters during a major news conference Thursday night, he slipped up by mistakenly referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.”
A Reuters reporter asked the president if he was confident Harris could take on former President Donald Trump if she were asked to lead the ticket and replace him as the presidential candidate.
“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump as vice president if I didn’t think she was unqualified to be president,” Biden said. “The fact is, I think I’m the most qualified person to run for president. I beat him once and I’ll beat him again,” he continued, stumbling a bit over his words.
“I wouldn’t have chosen her if I didn’t think she was qualified to be president. I was very clear about that from the beginning. She is qualified to be president,” he added.
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The comments were made during a press conference scheduled for 6:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, which took place an hour later — the first standalone press conference the president has held since November. He delivered it while attending a NATO summit in Washington, D.C.
It also came hours after the president accidentally referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin” when introducing him at the summit during the Ukraine Pact launch event. He quickly corrected the gaffe and then joked with Zelenskyy about it.
The conference also came amid calls from Democrats for the president to resign after a lackluster debate performance against former President Donald Trump, who will likely be his political rival in the November election in a rerun of the 2020 race on June 27. Biden could be seen frozen, stumbling over his words and speaking in a weak, frail voice that had his entire party scrambling to conduct damage control after the fact.
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Thursday’s conference was set to be a key event in what has been seen as a monumental week for Biden’s campaign. His last formal solo news conference took place in November 2023, when he took questions from reporters after a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in California.
During that press conference, Biden called on reporters from four different organizations, one of whom asked two questions, before White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stepped in to end the conference, though Biden did answer nine additional questions.
Their last joint press conference took place last month, after the G7 summit. Since the disastrous June debate, Biden has been trying to fend off calls to backtrack from that debate and reassure not just senior members of his own party, but the broader public, that he is up to the task.
He is already expected to become the Democratic presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention, which will be held from August 19 to 22 in Chicago, Illinois. But if his party intervenes, it could mean the end of his political career.
Peter Welch, a Democratic senator from Vermont, was the first to call for Biden’s resignation, and on Thursday, another Democrat added his name to the growing list of politicians who have made the same call.
Rep. Ed Case (D-Hawaii) issued a statement Thursday afternoon expressing concerns and doubts about Biden’s ability to perform the duties of the “world’s toughest job” for another four years. Case acknowledged that replacing him would be “difficult and uncertain,” but the Democrat doesn’t believe that continuing on a path that continues to place the 81-year-old on a pedestal is the “best path forward for our country.”
Case is now among more than a dozen House Democrats who have issued a similar call, with several of them appearing Thursday ahead of the news conference.
Research compiled by Towson University presidential scholar Martha Kumar, who is professor emeritus of political science at the institution, shows that Biden has held fewer press conferences and given fewer interviews than all of his recent predecessors, holding just 37 press conferences during his tenure as president.
By comparison, Ronald Reagan, the president in recent history with the fewest votes, had just 25 at the same point in his presidency. The next-fewest voter after Biden was Barack Obama, who had 73 at the same point. Most had close to 100 or more.
Kumar’s research indicated that he prefers brief, informal exchanges with reporters rather than actual conferences. Biden holds the record for the fewest interviews a president has participated in since Reagan, with just 133. The second-lowest was George W. Bush, who held 171 at the same point in his presidency.
As calls for Biden to resign grow louder, division has begun to damage the Democratic Party just months away from what many consider one of the most important elections in most Americans’ lifetimes. Time will tell how all of this affects not only next month’s Democratic National Convention, but also the Nov. 5 election.
