In a video posted to X on Tuesday afternoon, Alina Habba gave a short 30-second tour of the set that was constructed in the Old Executive Office Building where most of the press events were hosted during Biden’s tenure.
The reason? A big, fat teleprompter to tell him what to do.
“We’re in Biden’s fake Oval Office, everybody!” Habba said during the video.
“And I’ve actually figured this out. I now know why. I now get it. Turn the camera around,” she said.
And there it was: “There is a screen, a teleprompter to the face. All I can say is, the last administration was a disgratz,” she added.Indeed, you’ve probably seen this office before — although not with Trump there.
Granted, this wasn’t actually a mystery. It’s just something that Biden’s people, you know, preferred the media didn’t focus on. The media, like the well-trained Cavalier King Charles spaniels that they are, mostly sat in the lap of the Biden White House and got pets and scritchies from the president’s retinue.
Occasionally, however, the lapdogs would prove they weren’t entirely house-trained and pee on the fake Oval Office carpet — like Politico did in May 2022, during an article noting that a Biden-Trump rematch was looking “increasingly likely,” although “neither side wants to move first.”
“President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have both told aides and confidants that they’re more likely to run for the White House next cycle — and confident in their chances of winning — if the other runs, too. But as each camp gears up for a rematch of the bitterly contested 2020 contest, there remains a small hiccup: Neither is inclined to take the plunge first,” Politico’s Jonathan Lemire and Meridith McGraw noted.
In Trump’s case, the fact that he was going to run again was patently obvious to even the most casual political observer, although Politico noted he was “hesitant to announce soon, because once he does he would be restricted in how he could utilize and coordinate with certain political committees tied to him.”
In Biden’s case, it was a bit more problematic, especially because of “intraparty concerns about his age — on Election Day 2024 he will be just shy of 82 — and shaky poll numbers.”
That was also stating the obvious, although there were some fun nuggets in there about how “some allies and Democrats privately worry that Biden may not be able to handle the rigors of another campaign” — boy, did “some allies and Democrats” turn out to be right — including the why behind the fake Oval Office.
“A bone he broke in his foot while playing with his dog in late November 2020 still occasionally bothers Biden, resulting in a slower and shorter gait. And the White House has largely abandoned using the Oval Office for press events in part because it can’t be permanently equipped with a teleprompter,” Politico reported.
“Biden aides prefer the fake White House stage built in the Old Executive Office Building next door for events, sacrificing some of the power of the historic backdrop in favor of an otherwise sterile room that was outfitted with an easily read teleprompter screen.”
Those lapdogs, sometimes they can ruin a perfectly nice rug in a sterile room where an infirm president can read directions off a screen. At least they didn’t relieve themselves on the cables; then he would have been in real trouble.
Naturally, were this a Republican president, White House correspondents would be parked day and night outside the fake Oval Office, reporting breathlessly on the crisis of confidence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. In this case, they simply forgot about it — until Alina Habba reminded us all of the propped-up president who pretended to run the country between January 2021 and January 2025.
We were never supposed to see this in detail. And, if Kamala Harris had won, we never would have. Funny how things like this get memory-holed.
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