The media is having a meltdown over the fact that Joe Biden hasn’t held a formal press conference since he became president. It’s just a stupid reflex they constantly turn to when they don’t have anything else to complain about. They bitched about Hillary Clinton failing to do it during her campaign and gave Biden grif for failing to be at their beck and call in 2020.
Here’s a reminder of the one formal press conference Donald Trump gave in his first year in office:
It was an exhausting 77-minute extravaganza, and any five-minute segment would have been enough to make front-page headlines around the world.
For the president of the United States, the simple act of sneezing can be newsworthy. When the president goes on a freeform monologue, occasionally interrupted by questions, that is almost the length of a motion picture, as Donald Trump did on Thursday, the news can be overwhelming. The entirety represents a deluge that is difficult to process.
The result was a spectacle that was sheer entertainment if not terribly presidential. It was more comedian Henny Youngman than President William Henry Harrison as Trump needled reporters and engaged in a brand of insult comedy that was familiar from the campaign trail. At times, reporters couldn’t help but laugh at the president’s jabs despite their best instincts, simply because Trump’s comments were just that wacky and bizarre.
At times, the interactions with reporters went beyond combative into a Twilight Zone. Trump told an Orthodox Jewish reporter who asked him about an upsurge in antisemitic incidents that he had asked “a very insulting question”. He later suggested to an African American reporter who had asked about whether Trump had consulted with the Congressional Black Caucus about his plan for inner cities that she should organize the meeting. “Tell you what, do you want to set up the meeting? Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours?” the president asked the reporter about an influential bloc of lawmakers.
Trump suggested that “drugs are becoming cheaper than candy bars”; insisted he only claimed falsely at the beginning of the press conference that he had won “the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan” (in fact George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all won more electoral college votes) because he “was given bad information”; and opined in detail on CNN’s programming and ratings in its 10pm hour.
Biden will have a press conference soon, I have no doubt. And it will not be anything like that which will disappoint the press corps. They are jonesing for some Trump right now.
They aren’t going to get it.