President Joe Biden used several cheat sheets during his press conference — including one with photos and names of reporters he was planning to call on.
The New York Post said the printed note cards are clearly visible in photos taken Thursday. He also used the cards to assist with facts concerning the U.S. infrastructure.
"The United States now ranks 13th globally in infrastructure quality — down from 5th place in 2002," said the notes on one card.
However, during the press conference Biden slipped up and said the U.S. ranked 85th in the world in infrastructure, according to the Post. He ended up correcting himself.
A photo posted by the newspaper showed the same card contained a bullet point on China and infrastructure.
It read: "China spends 3 times more on infrastructure than U.S." Underneath it was another bullet point, which read: "Bridges: More than 1/3 of our bridges (231,000) need repairs or preservation work."
The Post said Biden was aided in many of his responses by notes he kept in a three-ring binder.
And the president, holding his first press conference since taking office 65 days ago, addressed questions from a list of journalists and news outlets he read from printed sheets. A photo showed circled numbers around certain reporters.
About 30 reporters sat spaced out using the length of the room instead of the width, as former President Donald Trump had news conferences set up.
In the end, Biden's event lasted 1 hour, 2 minutes, featuring 28 questions — 18 of which were follow-ups — from 10 reporters.
Fox News noted that Biden fielded questions about the ongoing crisis at the border with Mexico, his view on some lawmakers’ calls to end the filibuster, and a variety of other issues.
An early hot-button topic was the Senate filibuster that requires 60 votes to end debate on legislation and move to a vote.
"It used to be you had to stand there and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk until you collapsed," said Biden, who served in the Senate for decades before presiding over the Senate as vice president for eight years. "And guess what? People got tired of talking and tired of collapsing. Filibusters broke down and we're able to break the filibuster and get a quorum and vote. So, I strongly support moving in that direction."
Biden was the first chief executive in four decades to have reached this far into his term without having conducted a formal question-and-answer session.
And Fox News said the use of notes is not unprecedented at presidential press conferences. Trump had a notebook with handwritten prompts during a November 2019 press conference about testimony at his first impeachment hearing.
Jeffrey Rodack ✉
Jeffrey Rodack, who has nearly a half century in news as a senior editor and city editor for national and local publications, has covered politics for Newsmax for nearly seven years.
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