How bad are things inside Bidenworld—a circular firing squad that my partner John Heilemann recently remarked makes the finale of Reservoir Dogs look like a Merchant Ivory film? I’m told by a reliable source that earlier this week, before the Biden camp settled on a sit-down with NBC’s Lester Holt next Monday night, they considered having the president deliver a primetime Oval Office address during the Republican convention in an attempt to make a scripted, direct (and, of course, desperate) appeal to a larger audience, since all the networks would be obliged to carry it. “He won’t leave that office until there are no more tools to use,” said the source. (White House spokesperson Andrew Bates denied that they were considering an option typically reserved for moments of national emergency.)  

One such instrument to reclaim the media narrative, of course, was the press conference that Biden held Thursday night at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. He walked into the solo presser—his first since last November—and started strongly by reading a speech on teleprompter, despite the intermittent coughing. And he produced a solid, at times authoritative response when asked about China. But he also handed new ammo to his skeptics when he answered the first question, in part, by referring to Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump,” a gaffe which predictably received an almost instantaneous response—“Great job, Joe!”—from Trump on Truth Social.