White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed the artificial White House stage was constructed for President Joe Biden due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Because of COVID and because the president was not going to travel as much and not as many people were not going come here, he does a lot of events and actually meetings from there,” Psaki revealed in an interview with actor Rob Lowe on his podcast Literally.
Lowe asked Psaki about the artificial set that was constructed in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the West Wing.
The artificial stage includes digital video screens behind the windows make it look as if the president is in the West Wing of the White House.
Psaki confirmed that the Biden team added additional features to make it more friendly for streaming video conference calls.
“They built it out more to make it look a little bit better visually and to ensure that he can kind of engage with people and see them in different boxes,” she said.
President Biden spoke to governors about their concerns over the Omicron variant and the need for more COVID-19 tests. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The White House has been reluctant to discuss the purpose for Biden’s artificial set, despite growing awareness of the president’s reliance on it for events.
Biden typically reads an opening statement a teleprompter or from his notes on the stage before turning the event over to staff to run the event and send away reporters.
But Psaki boasted that Biden proved his ability to speak for a lengthy amount of time during his “record-breaking” long press conference in January.
“It was not planned. It was planned to be an hour,” she said, confirming Biden “had a list of questioners just so he knew who to call on.
“I think in the moment he just decided to take some more questions,” Psaki said.
She said she was “pretty chill” about the longer press conference but ultimately criticized the reporters.
“I think when some of the questions started to be off in ‘cuckoo for coco puffs’ land there, I was thinking, where are we going here with this,” she recalled.
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