President Biden tried a pratfall of his own hours before taping a late-night comedy interview with ABC presenter Jimmy Kimmel, falling up the steps of Air Force One as he went on another day without a one-on-one interview with a journalist.
Biden began his tense ascent of the plane’s steps after declining to accept questions from reporters, who had complained about Biden’s lack of press availability on the journey to Los Angeles.
The president’s stumble went virtually ignored, in part because video was not immediately broadcast by TV networks with unfiltered pool feeds, such as C-SPAN.
Despite the fact that Biden hasn’t granted a reporter an on-the-record sit-down interview in over four months, his interview with comic Jimmy Kimmel was scheduled.
Biden issued a statement just before his fall in response to the recall of far-left San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin on Tuesday night.
Biden, 79, then walked away from the journalists and boarded the plane. As he left the White House on Wednesday morning, he did not stop to talk with reporters.
Last month, when he went to Illinois, the president, whose critics routinely accuse him of mental impairment, appeared to lose his footing navigating Air Force One’s steps. Biden frequently fell on the steps in March 2021. The White House blamed the incident on the airport’s windy conditions.
Biden will spend the next three days in Los Angeles as the host of the Summit of the Americas, which has been overshadowed by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s decision to boycott the event after the White House refused to invite the leftist authoritarian leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
A journalist questioned White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan on board Air Force One about why Biden did not hold a news conference while in Los Angeles, as he has done at prior international summits.
