(Headline USA) Days after claiming he’d recently had a conversation with long-dead French President François Mitterrand, President Joe Biden mixed up yet another European official, confusing former German Chancellor Angela Merkel for the deceased German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
According to Bloomberg News, the 81-year-old made the gaffe at a fundraiser in New York on Wednesday during a story about his trip to his first G7 meeting after taking office, when he declared that “America’s back.”
It was one of several recent slips for Biden, who also forgot the name of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, and who was cited in a report by special counsel Robert Hur as having severe memory loss during an interview about his mishandling of classified documents.
Hur’s damning 388-page report indicated that Biden could not remember when he was vice president or details about the death of his older son, Beau.
During his New York fundraiser, Biden mentioned Kohl as part of a rambling anecdote, claiming that the long-serving leader who presided over the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Soviet Union had questioned him about the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising at the U.S. Capitol.
“…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 [to] deny the prime minister to take office?’” Biden recounted.
Kohl, however, died in 2017, three and a half years before the mass demonstration by supporters of President Donald Trump to protest the certification of the disputed 2020 election.
Merkel was the German chancellor at the time of Biden’s first G7 meeting, which took place in Cornwall, England.
On Sunday, at a Nevada campaign event, Biden told the same story about his meeting with world leaders at the G7 but mixed up French President Emmanuel Macron with Mitterrand, who served as president of France from 1981 to 1995 and died in 1996.
“I sat down, and I said, ‘America’s back,'” Biden told the crowd. “And Mitterrand from Germany—I mean from France—looked at me and said … ‘Well, how long are you back for?’”
Asked about the embarrassing incident on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed the question and insisted that she would not “go down that rabbit hole with you,” Mediaite reported.
Fox News’s Peter Doocy replied, “Why is it a rabbit hole?”
But Jean-Pierre again refused to answer the question, nebulously saying, “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.”
Some have speculated that Biden will soon make a pre-planned announcement that he is dropping out of the 2024 re-election campaign, thereby making room for a candidate with stronger prospects of defeating Trump.
If so, his rapid mental deterioration may, in fact, be written into the script, although concerns over Biden’s possible dementia have long fueled questions about his fitness for office.
