It's no secret that Joe Biden is not good at handling being in front of cameras or otherwise in the public eye, a significant issue for the man who happens to be the president of the United States. It's also not a secret that his White House aides have gone to significant lengths in generally futile attempts to keep a tight leash on Biden to prevent gaffes, contradictions of official policy, or aimless rambling.
Biden's staff have complained, anonymously of course, of having limited prime-time hours during which they're free to schedule public events for Biden in order to try getting him in front of cameras when he's at his supposed peak performance and then back behind closed doors before the wheels come off.
At his limited public events, and on the rare occasion that he takes questions, reporters' names and outlets to call on are provided to Biden ahead of time — even sometimes reportedly with the reporters' apparently pre-cleared question and suggested answers.
Aides even went so far as to construct a fake White House lookalike set inside an auditorium adjacent to the West Wing in which a teleprompter could be permanently installed so Biden would always have a script to follow in front of him.
Even with all these efforts to keep Biden from going off-script, saying the wrong or incorrect thing, or betraying how lost he is on-stage, the president still frequently crumbles under the lights.
Just look at his performance, shall we say, in Vietnam over the weekend.
It was clear things were not going to go well when Biden, in an apparent off-script opening, floated a joke about "Good Evening, Vietnam" which did not draw an enjoyable response from those in attendance.
BIDEN: "Good evening, everyone. It is evening, isn't it? This around the world in five days is interesting. Well, one of my staff members said, 'Remember the famous song, Good Morning, Vietnam?' Well, good evening, Vietnam." pic.twitter.com/PjvBtiVcLN
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 10, 2023
It didn't get any better from there.
"Let's see, I'm just following orders here," Biden said before silently shuffling through papers on his presidential podium for nearly 15 seconds and appearing quite lost as to what he was supposed to be doing before calling out to "staff" to ask about anyone he still needed to call on. Reporters began shouting questions and Biden yelled back "I ain't calling on you." An aide then instructed him to take a question from a Voice of America reporter, a cue with which Biden quickly complied.
Later, Biden declared he was "going to go to bed" and continued rambling while an aide brought the mess to as merciful an end as possible while the president was still mumbling.
Joe Biden's powerful quotes at a Hanoi, Vietnam international press conference: "I'm just following my orders here" and "I don't know about you, but I am going to go to bed". We have reached peak gerontocracy. #biden #vietnam #potus pic.twitter.com/7lrYXFWyd8
— Stellar Man (@stellarman22) September 10, 2023
Despite the fact that Biden, by his own admission, is just "following orders" and isn't required to do much of any thinking of his own on the go, he still can't get through events without raising serious questions about his fitness. Perhaps we should just be grateful he remained mostly silent through his confusion rather than ad-libbing a call for regime change in Russia or changing decades of U.S. policy toward Taiwan — two international incidents Biden has caused before that necessitated swift clean up by staff to clarify that what Biden said was not actually what he meant.