President Joe Biden has again claimed he spoke to a deceased dignitary at the 2021 G7 summit, Daily Mail reports.
The 81-year-old US president told an anecdote at a speech in Las Vegas on Monday about attending the summit in England in June 2021. In the anecdote, he mentioned that he spoke to French President Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996, rather than current leader Emmanuel Macron.
On Wednesday, Biden told a similar anecdote about the summit at two fundraising events in New York, according to the pool report. As he did on Monday, while telling the anecdote to other leaders at the summit, he said that “America is back,” to which the French president – whom Biden did not name this time – responded, “For how long?”
Biden says he “never thought of it that way.” Biden then said he was approached by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl about the nature of the 6 January uprising. Kohl died in 2017 and did not attend the 2021 summit. Biden said:
“Helmut Kohl of Germany looked at me and said, ‘What would you say Mr. President if you picked up the London Times tomorrow morning and learned there’s 1000 broken down the doors of the British parliament, killed some [inaudible] on the way in to deny the next prime minister to take office. And you think, what would we think?”
Biden really met German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G7 summit, but Kohl died on 16 June 2017 and has not been chancellor since 1998.
At another fundraising event in New York, he recounted a similar encounter, mentioned Macron, and then told the same story about a hypothetical Kohl. Biden’s embarrassment is just the latest gaffe by the famous president, who stuttered as a child and called himself a “gaffe machine.”
Like Merkel, 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 with Mitterrand as a young senator. It is not known if there were any meetings between Biden and Kohl, who served as chancellor from 1982 to 1998. Mitterrand took office in 1981, when the current French president was three years old.
Biden, as chairman of the Committee on European Affairs, met with Mitterrand in January 1988 while discussing the Soviet nuclear arms treaty. Mitterrand was president until 1995, and died a year later at the age of 79. It is the latest in a growing list of presidential missteps since he took office.
The 81-year-old president has repeatedly said his son Beau died in Iraq, not Walter Reed Hospital, and in June 2023 confused the ongoing war in Ukraine with the war in Iraq, which ended in 2011. He stated that Vladimir Putin was “clearly losing the war in Iraq.”
That same month, he ended a speech on gun control with the bizarre statement:
“God save the Queen.”
Queen Elizabeth II died in September 2022, so some thought he was referring to Queen Camilla, but the relevance of the statement was unclear.
The following month, Biden claimed to have reached a major medical milestone, announcing:
“We ended cancer as we know it”.
And in December 2023, he boasted of infrastructure spending, saying it amounted to:
“Over a billion, 300 million, trillion, 300 million dollars.”
Biden also condemned Donald Trump’s gaffes, noting that Trump refers to “the beginning of World War II” which has been and gone, and confuses Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. He noted:
“He’s a little confused these days.”
The White House on Tuesday refused to answer questions about President Biden’s fitness for office.
One reporter noted that Biden confused French leaders during the daily White House briefing on Monday, and a day later asked press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre how the president planned to respond to the roughly three-quarters of the public concerned about his physical and mental health. She replied:
“I’m not even going to go down that rabbit hole with you, sir.”
When the reporter objected that it wasn’t a rabbit hole, she expanded on her response by listing Biden’s busy itinerary lately. She said:
“You saw the president in Vegas, in California. You’ve seen the president in South Carolina. You saw him in Michigan. I’ll just leave it there.”
The episode only served to highlight Biden’s growing age. At 81, he is already the oldest president in history, and he is seeking another term that would keep him in office until he is 86.
In a DailyMail.com poll last year, 70 per cent of voters thought Biden was too old to be president. That included more than half of Democrats, a sign of the challenges he faces in his campaign for a second term.
