Joe Biden repeatedly mistook a senator’s wife for one of his own White House staffers, even after she told him who she was. This could be yet another example of the president’s mental decline.
Lee, a Utah Republican, revealed to DailyMail.com the awkward interaction between his wife and the president, in one of many signs of “alarm” over Biden’s decline.
He said he and his wife, Sharon, had met the president several times. But at a White House reception for the wives of members of Congress about two years ago, the president did not recognize her when she greeted him.
Biden asked her name, but clearly couldn’t remember her despite having met multiple times. He then asked if she worked for him in the White House.
When she told him she was the wife of Sen. Mike Lee, Biden looked confused and then asked her again if she was on his staff.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, with his wife Sharon Lee, at the White House in 2020. Lee said his wife told him that President Joe Biden had completely forgotten who she was and asked her if she worked in the East Wing of the White House. After she told him no and that she was Sen. Lee’s wife, he asked her again if she worked in the West Wing of the White House
The “odd” interaction led Lee to suspect that the president “isn’t quite ready yet,” he said on the Tucker Carlson Show.
“He swore me in as a senator twice,” Lee told Carlson directly, describing the two’s interactions from 2011 to 2017.
“We were in touch with him a lot and she thought this would solve the problem,” Lee said of his wife’s assumption that Biden would remember her.
“He looked confused,” Sharon had said.
“He wasn’t quite there,” the Republican senator said of Biden after recounting his wife’s story.
“There was a deer in the headlights kind of thing,” (Sharon) said. “It was like talking to someone who didn’t know what was going on.”
‘I have had quite a lot of contact with Joe Biden over the years, my wife of course much less, but she has often enough recognized and understood his personality. She realized that this does not suit him at all.’
“He just looked confused and forgot what he was supposed to be doing.” The Republican called the interaction “alarming.”
Lee told DailyMail.com about other instances where Biden’s age and capabilities raised concerns.
He said he has studied Biden’s extensive use of teleprompters and other tools since at least 2021.
Lee said Biden has been the least interactive president of any president he has served under since Obama.
It is odd that Biden, a former senator, has had little contact with the Senate since taking office. He said he has been to the House less often than Trump and Obama.
The Utah senator also indicated that Biden was “not careful” about reading from a script over the phone.
“Anyone who’s in politics knows that you have staff that give you things to guide your conversations, that you have to be careful about, not, you know, at least clearly, reading a script off a phone. And he wasn’t being careful at all.”
Biden was at the forefront of attacks against him while still campaigning for re-election.
Senator Mike Lee pictured with his wife Sharon Lee
Even in the weeks after he canceled his campaign, Republicans have called on his Cabinet, and Vice President Kamala Harris in particular, to invoke the 25th Amendment, which governs presidential succession in the event of an incapacitated commander.
Videos of him freezing up in public and his rambling and stumbling interviews have further fueled concerns about his health and fitness.
Lee also told DailyMail.com that the president was beginning to show symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, which his mother-in-law also died from a few years ago.
When the doctor received the diagnosis, he told him that Lee would start to notice real signs of deterioration as his mother-in-law’s posture and gait began to suffer.
“One day it suddenly hit me: my goodness, he’s walking like Carol, he’s walking like my mother-in-law walked when the symptoms that the doctors had pointed out to us started happening,” he told DailyMail.com.
“It’s kind of a shuffle of kicking your feet forward. It’s not a fluid movement. It’s a little bit more robotic.”
“I saw that same walk and posture in President Biden during his first term.”
Senator Mike Lee pictured with his wife Sharon Lee
There could be other reasons for these symptoms, Lee continued, but he said he also saw other clear signs of “cognitive decline.”
US President Joe Biden pauses before addressing the nation about his decision not to seek re-election
Lee said Biden’s gait is reminiscent of the shuffling his mother-in-law used to do
‘He may say a few words in a row or an entire sentence that is almost unintelligible, or that makes no sense, or is factually or logically improbable, or he may seem to get lost while performing a very simple task, such as walking from point A to point B.’
“So when you add all those things together, and as I said, most of the things I added up were based on publicly available information, I have no doubt that he had a lot of bad days, probably more bad days than good.”