The trouble started when the teleprompter stopped

The trouble began as soon as the teleprompter was turned off.

- RICHARD HALL

Just two weeks after a disastrous debate plunged his campaign into crisis, and with heavy hitters in his own party refusing to publicly support him, Joe Biden’s performance needed to be flawless.

But in his first answer, to the first question, at his first open press conference in eight months, he confused his running-mate with his mortal enemy and destroyer of democracy, Donald Trump.

“I wouldn’t have picked vice president Trump to be vice president if I didn’t think she was qualified,” he said, without correcting himself.

That might not have drawn so much attention if he hadn’t confused president Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine with his mortal enemy, Russian president Vladimir Putin, just hours earlier.

On the scale of presidential gaffes, they landed somewhere between George HW Bush vomiting in the Japanese prime minister’s lap at a banquet and a break-in at the Watergate Hotel.