During a speech on Monday, Joe Biden appeared to confuse current French President Emmanuel Macron with his predecessor Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996.
In Las Vegas before Tuesday’s Nevada primaries, the president told an anecdote about attending the G7 summit in England in June 2021.
“It was in the south of England and I sat down and said, ‘America is back,’” Biden recalled.
“And Mitterrand from Germany, I mean from France, looked at me and said, ‘You know, how long will you be back?’
Continuing his ramblings, Biden said then-Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel asked him how he would feel if he heard about the storming of parliament in Britain. Biden said it was a new way to look at the Jan. 6 riot with new eyes.
During a speech on Monday, Joe Biden seemed to confuse current French President Emmanuel Macron with his predecessor Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996.
While telling an anecdote about the G7 summit in June 2021, Biden confused French President Francois Mitterrand (pictured), who died in 1996, with the current French president.
Biden knows the current president of France, Emmanuel Macron (photo), well. He is the youngest president in French history and the youngest French head of state since Napoleon
‘I never thought about it from that perspective. What would we say if that happened in any other democracy around the world,” Biden said.
He added: “That’s not going to happen. This guy is going to lose.”
Biden’s confusion between Mitterrand and Macron is embarrassing for an 81-year-old who is already struggling to convince the American public that he retains his full mental faculties.
He knows Macron, elected in 2017 at the age of 39, well: Macron is the youngest president in French history and the youngest French head of state since Napoleon.
Biden also met Mitterrand as a young senator.
Mitterrand took office in 1981, when the current French president was three years old.
Biden met Mitterrand as chairman of the European Affairs Committee in January 1988 while discussing a Soviet nuclear weapons treaty.
Mitterrand was president until 1995 and died a year later, at the age of 79.
Biden’s confusion is just the latest blunder for the famously folksy president, who stuttered as a child and called himself a “gaffe machine.”
He has repeatedly said that his son Beau died in Iraq, rather than at Walter Reed, and that in June 2023 he clouded the ongoing war in Ukraine for the war in Iraq, which ended in 2011.
He declared that Vladimir Putin was “clearly losing the war in Iraq.”
Biden’s confusion is just the latest blunder for the famously folksy president. He has said repeatedly that his son Beau died in Iraq, rather than at Walter Reed
Biden has previously said he was confusing the war in Ukraine with the war in Iraq and declared that Vladimir Putin was “clearly losing the war in Iraq.”
That same month, he concluded a speech on gun control with the bizarre proclamation: “God save the Queen, man.”
Queen Elizabeth II had died in September 2022, so some thought he meant Queen Camilla, but the relevance was unclear.
The following month, Biden claimed to have reached a medical milestone, declaring, “We have ended cancer as we know it.”
And in December 2023, he bragged about infrastructure spending, saying it amounted to: “Over a billion, 300 million, trillion, 300 million dollars.”
Biden has also spoken out about Donald Trump’s blunders — noting that Trump refers to “starting World War II,” which is already over, and confuses Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi.
“He’s a little confused these days,” Biden said.