President Joe Biden continues to reference recent conversations with deceased foreign leaders as he struggles to remember the exact details of past meetings.
During fundraisers in New York City Wednesday, Biden twice recalled a conversation with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl about the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill during the 2021 G7 summit.
“Helmut Kohl from Germany looked at me and said, ‘What would you say, Mr. President, if you picked up the London Times tomorrow morning and learned that a thousand people broke down the doors of the British Parliament and some (inaudible) killed when they entered? to prevent the next Prime Minister from taking office. And then you think: what would we think?’ Biden claimed at one event.
Kohl died in 2017.
Biden has a history of struggling to remember who is alive and who has died
US President Joe Biden speaks in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC on February 6, 2024.
While telling anecdotes from a G7 summit, Biden repeatedly confuses the names of deceased world leaders with their modern counterparts.
The White House on Thursday defended Biden’s recent mistakes, noting that political figures often make mistakes when speaking in public.
“In terms of the names and what he was trying to say, a lot of people, elected officials — a lot of people can sometimes mispronounce,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at the White House news conference after reporters repeatedly asked about the errors.
Speaking in Las Vegas on Monday, Biden recalled the same summit meeting, referring to a conversation he had with French President Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996, instead of current leader Emmanuel Macron.
Biden’s mistakes are notable, as he frequently references these two conversations with European leaders on the fundraising circuit with Democratic donors.
He warns that European leaders are concerned about the threat that former President Donald Trump poses to the future of global democracy.
The White House declined to respond to questions about the president’s mental health on Tuesday.
A reporter pointed out Biden’s gaffe that confused French leaders during the daily White House briefing on Tuesday, but Jean-Pierre shot the question aside.
“I’m not even going down that rabbit hole with you, sir,” she replied to Fox News’ Peter Doocy. When he countered that it wasn’t a rabbit hole, she listed Biden’s busy recent itinerary.
“You saw the president in Vegas, in California,” she said. “You saw the president in South Carolina. You saw him in Michigan. I’ll just leave it at that.’
Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre speaks to reporters during a press conference at the White House in Washington, USA, February 6, 2024
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre speaks during a press conference at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, February 6, 2024
Biden’s apparent confusion prompted some mild criticism from Late Night host Stephen Colbert on Tuesday.
‘I’m telling you. It’s a feature, not a bug. It’s all summed up in his new campaign slogan, Biden 2024: I see dead people!’ he joked.
The president’s struggles only remind voters of Biden’s advancing age. At the age of 81, he is already the oldest president in history, and he is running for another term that would keep him in office until he is 86.
It’s not the only time Biden has mixed up the names of world leaders.
In 2019, he briefly referenced a conversation about America under former President Donald Trump with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, when he meant to refer to then Prime Minister Theresa May.
“Margaret Thatcher – er, excuse me, Margaret Thatcher, a Freudian slip,” Biden said in 2019, realizing the mistake and correcting himself. “But I knew her too.”
In 2019, President Biden referenced a conversation with Margaret Thatcher about former President Donald Trump before correcting himself.
During a speech in November 2022, Biden recalled a conversation with a man who “invented” insulin, even though the man who discovered the drug died in 1941, a year before Biden was born.
In September 2022, Biden gave a shoutout to the late Republican Indiana Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., who died in a car crash in August 2022.
“Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?’ Biden said as he scanned a crowd of lawmakers at a conference on hunger. “She shouldn’t be here.”
President Joe Biden looks out in the crowd for Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-IN), weeks after she died in a car crash.
The White House dismissed the incident by noting that the congresswoman was simply “top of mind” for the president.
“I mean, I think a lot of people can talk sometimes when you have people top of mind, they’re top of mind,” Jean-Pierre told reporters at the time.
It’s the latest in a growing list of mistakes the president has made since taking office.
The 81-year-old has repeatedly said that his son Beau died in Iraq, rather than at Walter Reed, clouding the ongoing war in Ukraine in June 2023 for the Iraq war, which ended in 2011.
He declared that Russia’s Vladimir Putin was “clearly losing the war in Iraq.”
In 2023, he concluded a speech on gun control with the bizarre proclamation: “God save the Queen, man,” even after Queen Elizabeth II died in September 2022.
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’s missteps only add to the concerns American voters have about the president’s mental and physical capabilities as he runs for re-election.
According to a recent NBC PollA total of 76 percent of voters are very or moderately concerned that 81-year-old Biden has the necessary mental and physical health to become president for a second term.
Sixty-two percent of voters in the poll say they have “major concerns” about Biden’s mental and physical health.