Joe Biden Shows Off His Notes for the State of the Union and Perhaps He Shouldn't Have

Joe Biden’s handlers took to social media on Monday to show off the president’s notes for his coming State of the Union. Perhaps they shouldn’t have.

In a self-ascribed post (that no one believes the president wrote himself), Biden says he’s “getting ready” accompanied by a picture of the first page of his speech. Chocolate chip cookies are shown because, you see, the president is just like us. He likes cookies and stuff.

But I digress, the part that had people talking about what was on the page.
 

Getting ready. pic.twitter.com/UhERyDuxTO

— President Biden (@POTUS) February 6, 2023

You can click the tweet and browse the replies, but yes, that’s a single sentence that adds up to about five seconds of speaking taking up an entire page. At the end of that mental marathon, we then see that Biden even has to have his pauses scripted. Hopefully, given his history, he doesn’t read what’s in the brackets on Tuesday night.

Now, I know the response will be that this is normal. All presidents who give State of the Union addresses have massive font notes with their mannerisms written out for them to know what to do. Is that true, though?
Out of curiosity, I went and looked up what the notes from George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump’s speeches looked like (see the pictures here, here, and here respectively). All of them include far more words per page and none of them had things like pauses scripted out. In other words, they had normal notes you’d expect a normal human being to have. Compare that to Biden’s picture, and it’s night and day.

Of course, Biden’s overly scripted speeches are nothing new. He’s famously used a massive television as a teleprompter over his tenure that includes every blink and breath scripted out for him. Continue reading here.