Biden Once Again Gets Leaders Mixed Up, Says He Spoke to Leader who Died in 2017
For the second time in a week, President Joe Biden on Wednesday claimed to have spoken to a dead European leader.
This time, it was the late German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017.
Biden claimed to have spoken with him four years later, following the Jan. 6, 2021, incursion at the U.S. Capitol, according to Reuters.
The gaffe occurred during a fundraising reception in New York, the outlet reported, where he told a story that it called “a staple of his stump speech.”
This time, however, instead of accurately describing a conversation between Chancellor Angela Merkel as it occurred at the G7 summit that year, he inserted Kohl’s name instead.
“When I first got elected president, I went to a G7 meeting with the seven heads of state in Europe and Great Britain. I sat down and I said, ‘Well, America’s back’ and the president of France looked at me and said, ‘for how long?’ I never thought of it this way,” Biden said, according to Reuters.
“Then 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 that 1,000 people had broken down the doors, the doors of the British Parliament and killed some [people] on the way in,'” the 81-year-old added.
As Politico noted, Kohl was chancellor from 1982 until 1998 — never while Biden was president, or even vice president.
Earlier in the week, Biden mentioned a conversation with the late François Mitterrand, who was president of France from 1981 through 1995 — also never while Biden occupied the White House in any capacity.
In fact, Biden was apparently telling another story about that same 2021 G7 summit when he mentioned Mitterrand, who died almost 20 years ago in 1996, in place of President Emmanuel Macron.
NBC News said that Biden actually made the Kohl error twice, repeating the same story with the same wrong German leader at to separate fundraising events in New York on Wednesday.
Even the left-leaning Daily Beast noted, under the headline “Biden Says He Spoke to a SECOND Dead European Statesman” [emphasis original], that the conversation Biden described “could only have happened through a ouija board.”
NBC cited a recent poll that showed that 76 percent of voters — including 54 percent of Democrats — said they had either “major concerns” or “moderate concerns” about Biden’s “mental and physical health.”
Only 11 percent of those surveyed said they had “no real concern” about Biden’s fitness for the roll.
The poll showed that fewer than half of the 1,000 registered voters surveyed, 48 percent, shared similar levels of concern about the fitness of former President Donald Trump, 77, to serve as the nation’s chief executive.
That was about equal to the 49 percent who had such concerns about Biden’s involvement in the “alleged wrongdoing and corruption” of his son, Hunter Biden.
“I think that [Biden’s] health and age kind of get in the way of his ability to be a good president of the United States,” said a female Democratic poll respondent from Wisconsin, who did not share her name but said she voted for Biden in 2020.
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