President Joe Biden was left to awkwardly manage a solo press conference on Wednesday after his four-hour meeting with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in San Francisco.
Xi preferred to avoid the press, scooting off to his reception with big-name American businessmen and leaving the Chinese Foreign Ministry to handle his public relations work.
If Xi had done a joint presser with Biden and taken some questions from the press, he might have avoided the awkward moment when Biden told a reporter he still views Xi as a “dictator.” It seems unlikely Biden would have answered that question the same way if Xi was standing behind him, although one never knows what will emerge from Biden’s mouth when he speaks off the cuff.
Every moment of Xi’s trip to San Francisco was tightly scripted, so the dictator was not about to let reporters take pot shots at him. After his meeting with…
