CHRIS HAYES: I want to bring in now NBC News correspondent Mike Memoli, who is at the press conference when President Biden was in the room. Mike, your impression having been there.
MIKE MEMOLI: Yeah. Well, Chris, as somebody who has covered President Biden for 16 years, there's so much to unpack from this news conference, I thought. So interesting to hear about the prospects for a convention in which delegates could vote their conscience. He talked about being open, potentially, to a neurological exam if the doctors recommend that. He talked about being willing to pass the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris if his advisors can convince him that he can’t win and that she can. I think for so many people watching this news conference, we can boil this down to two moments. The first was President Biden giving an extensive answer, detailed answer, an answer full of decades of experience on the world stage to the question about the future of China and what it means in our international order. This is somebody who I went to Beijing with in 2011 when he was vice president, had the first meetings of any world leader with Xi Jinping. If you want to know why President Biden wants to see this through, wants to finish the job, it’s because he thinks no one else can match that experience that he has in dealing with the most important foreign policy question of our time. It was a long answer, it was an extensive answer, it really was illustrative of how he is handling this important part of his job as Commander-in-Chief. But for those Democrats who tuned in tonight nervous about his candidacy moving forward, all they are going to remember is within the opening minutes talking about “Vice President Trump”. This speaks to the incredibly high bar, the high stakes that the president and the scrutiny that he’s going to be facing every day going forward in this campaign. If this press conference had happened on June 27th, on June 26th, we would not giving it the level of coverage, we would not be dissecting every answer the way we are now. But so many Democrats are watching this and doing just that. And, the president when he was a candidate for vice president, when he was a senator would make the same kind of verbal flubs that you’ve heard tonight. When I was covering him in the 2008 campaign there was a blog dedicated to those verbal miscues. “Oh, that Joe”. People wrote them off, laughed them off. Now they are seen as existential tests for his continued candidacy, and the question many Democrats are facing is, can this continue for another 120 or so days?
