(Headline USA) President Joe Biden embarrassingly butchered a quote by Abraham Lincoln during an event last week after insisting he would try to get it right, the New York Post reported.
Speaking to the National Governors Association at the White House on Saturday, the divisive demagogue complained that “politics has gotten too bitter” at the event, which several Republican governors had refused to attend due to the negative optics.
Biden noted the portrait of Lincoln, the first Republican president, looming behind him before attempting to quote the Great Emancipator: “You know, standing here in front of this portrait of the man behind me here, he—he said—and I want to make sure I get the quote exactly right,” Biden began. “He said, ‘The better angel.’ He said, ‘We must address the counsel—and adjust the better angels of our nature.'”
Biden continued to cite Lincoln, claiming the former president once said, “‘We’re not enemies, but we’re friends.’ This is the middle of … the Civil War. He said, ‘We’re not enemies, we’re friends. We must not be enemies.'”
Biden seems to have been trying to quote from Lincoln’s first inaugural address in March 1861, in which he tried to unite the country before the Civil War broke out—not during the war, as Biden suggested.
“Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection,” Lincoln told the divided nation. “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and heathstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched—as surely they will be—by the better angels of our nature.”
After realizing his mistake, Biden tried to write it off by making a joke about his age.
“Folks, I’ve been around—I know I don’t look it—I’ve been around a long while,” he told the governors.
Biden’s mental acuity has become a top issue for his campaign, with more than 80% of voters saying they believe he is too old to run for reelection, according to recent polls.
In the face of waning voter support, he has largely fallen back on vicious attacks on former President Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, regularly saying that to elect Trump would be a threat to the very fabric of democracy.
A recent Politico article revealed that Biden had referred to Trump openly among staffers as a “sick f**k” and a “f**king a**hole” on separate occasions.
