- Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre shut down questions about Biden’s blunder
- “I’m not even going down that rabbit hole with you, sir,” she said Tuesday
- Republicans are eager to highlight every stumble as a sign of declining health
The White House on Tuesday declined to be drawn into questions about President Joe Biden’s suitability for the job, a day after he appeared to claim he had recently spoken to a French head of state who died in the 1990s.
The incident came during a speech in Las Vegas, as Biden talked about a conversation with world leaders in the United Kingdom in 2021.
“I said, ‘America is back,’” he recalled.
“And Mitterrand from Germany, I mean from France, looked at me and said, ‘You know, how long will you be back?’
In fact, President Francois Mitterrand died in 1996, as Fox News Peter Doocy noted during the daily White House briefing a day later, when he asked press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre how the president would address about three-quarters of the population concerned about his physical and mental health.
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to be drawn into questions about Joe Biden’s fitness, a day after claiming he recently spoke with a French president who died in the 1990s
“I’m not even going down that rabbit hole with you, sir,” was her curt response.
When Doocy objected that it wasn’t a rabbit hole, she expanded her answer to list 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.’
The episode only served to highlight Biden’s increasing 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.
A DailyMail.com poll last year found that 70 percent of voters thought Biden was too old to be president. That included more than half of Democrats, demonstrating the challenge he faces as he campaigns for a second term.
Every blunder is seized, fair or unfair, that his age is getting in the way of him doing his job.
Instead of Mitterrand, he actually spoke to President Emmanuel Macron at that 2021 summit, a blunder made worse by Biden’s pedigree in foreign affairs.
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 when the future US president was a young senator.
French President Francois Mitterrand visited the Bay Area in 1984. Biden met him during his long career, though they certainly didn’t cross paths in England in 2021.
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
About 49 percent of Democrats admit Joe Biden is too old to be president in our poll of likely 2024 voters from last year. Only 28 percent think he is exactly the right age
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.”