Biden’s long-awaited press conference brings back traumatic memories of Trump’s first one

For better or for worse, nobody who lived through the Trump years will ever quite forget them. And if or when he comes back for another round, it will still be hard to recapture a sense of how they felt at the time — especially at the very start.

For his part, Biden has waited a bit — his first press conference is scheduled for today — and there may be less than edifying reasons for that. But he is not out to punish the media for asking him questions. We’ve seen what Biden can do when cornered, and it’s not always pleasant. He memorably told a Michigan plant worker convinced he would confiscate people’s guns that he was “full of s**t” – but that was on a genuine point of truth and fiction, a back-and-forth in the thick of an unscripted campaign walkabout. And more to the point, it wasn’t a rejection of the idea he should be questioned at all.

That’s thanks in part to the abrupt gear shift that was the start of the Biden administration. The stakes have been extremely high since day one, with a country in need of an epochal bailout and children still being detained in appalling conditions by the immigration authorities. But at least events are once again taking place on the Earth’s surface rather than in some godforsaken magma chamber deep beneath it.

But why will Biden’s first press conference matter? Almost entirely because of the timing, which much of the media say is worrisomely late. Nearly ten weeks into his administration, this president known for his gregariousness has yet to submit himself to a no-holds-barred on-camera grilling: What do he and his staff think could go wrong?

Plenty, of course, as there would be for any president – especially a president known for long answers, verbal indiscipline and a habit of thinking out loud. The resolutely sober Barack Obama sometimes bristled at these sorts of encounters; Bill Clinton seemed to relish them, and George W Bush held a full 27 in just his first year. Yet for whatever reason, Biden has been holding back.

This has not helped his image on the right, where critics are constantly gathering evidence that the supposedly senile Biden is all but entombed in the Oval Office while a kabuki administration puts on a radical Marxist virtue-signalling play at the gates of his mausoleum. But while he might fall up flight of stairs or give Kamala Harris the wrong job title now and then, Biden is not an incompetent. He’s also even-tempered and plain-spoken, qualities that make him hard to loathe however frustrating he and his administration might be.

And he invariably benefits from the slightest contrast with his predecessor, who visibly struggled to read from prepared remarks or to mold his jelly-like thoughts into anything but the strangest syntactical shapes.

Trump held only one solo press conference in his first year, but it’s safe to say Biden isn’t planning to spend 77 minutes alternately bragging and whining, angrily lashing out at reporters who ask him blunt, yes-or-no questions and narcissistically defending himself against perceived charges of bigotry, treason and failure. This is the bizarre spectacle the 45th president staged for the world in February 2017. Focused at the time on the sacking of Mike Flynn and the allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the press were ready to grill Trump on the specifics as he’d never been grilled before – and he was, in turn, ready for them. That is, ready to deny them what they wanted and instead poison the air.

The more persistent and specific the questioning, the more preoccupied Trump became with the mindset (and TV ratings) of the assembled press pack. “The failing New York Times wrote a big long front page story yesterday, and it was very much discredited, as you know.” “You go to rallies, they’re screaming at CNN, they want to throw their placards at CNN.” “The people get it, much of the media doesn’t get it — they actually get it but they don’t write it, let’s put it that way.”

A particular nadir came when Trump declared “I want to find a friendly reporter!” and called on Jake Turx, a reporter for a small magazine with a Jewish readership. He began by explaining to the president that he had never heard anyone in his community accuse Trump or his staff of anti-semitism, then asked him what he had to say about a wave of threats and attacks on Jews across the country.

As he detailed his concerns, Trump shut him down. “You know he’s said that he’s going to ask a very simple, easy question,” he griped, “and it’s not. It’s not a fair question. Sit down. I understand the rest of your question.”

As was already the recognised norm, the president then resumed talking about himself. “I’m the least anti-semitic person you’ve seen in your entire life,” he said, having ignored the first thing Turx said to him. “Quiet, quiet, he lied about getting up asking a straight, simple question, so, you know, welcome to the world of the media.”

This was months before a phalanx of white men in khakis descended upon Charlottesville to march around the UVA campus with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us”, but not long after the worst of the alt-right had gathered in DC to shout “hail Trump” and throw Hitler salutes into the air. Hate crimes against Jews and the myriad other groups loathed by white supremacists were starting to proliferate in an atmosphere deliberately polluted by the president’s more nefarious advisers – but for Trump, it was all about him.

That first press conference was Trump’s stage debut in his signature role: an unhinged, paranoid martyr-in-chief, obessively reframing even the most predictable questions as assassination attempts.

He had previewed these qualities during the campaign, but this was something different. Back then, his platforms were debates (one or two moderators, a mostly quiet audience) and rallies (no questions at all, an audience enraptured.) More importantly, he wasn’t the leader of the free world, and almost no one expected he ever would be. And then, suddenly, here we all were, hanging on the words of a bully obsessed with his own victimhood.

Four years and one month later, the same audience is more than ready for Joe Biden’s first mano-a-muchos-manos press event. The White House Briefing Room is a measured, logical place once again; unlike her brazenly propagandist predecessor Kayleigh McEnany, Jen Psaki tells, basically, the truth.

Yes, the press have been irritated by the hold-up that’s kept them from tackling Biden at length, but that’s not because they want to destroy him: it’s because they want information. That is, they want to do their jobs.