What are those things on the ground in the Washington Compost picture?
It's for stage positioning - a "MARK".
WaPo was pointing to the use of (overly-long) tape strips to indicate where the muckety-mucks should stand. Those tape strips were circled in red for the photo. Quite possibly, the reporter didn't notice that a Doppelgänger for Biden was in play. Duh!
In short, the reporter's point was that Biden minions couldn't stand where they were supposed to.