President Biden’s latest mix-up, this one involving a dead French president, is just one in a string of similar occurrences in recent years.
On Sunday, Biden told a Las Vegas crowd he met with François Mitterrand, a French president who has been deceased for 28 years. Biden made the blunder while retelling the story of a gathering with French President Emmanuel Macron at a G7 meeting shortly before he entered the Oval Office.
“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 …”
Biden then assembled his thoughts to complete the sentence: “Well, how long are you back for?”
Mitterrand, to whom Biden had referenced, was France’s president from the early 1980s to mid-1990s and died in early 1996.
Biden’s gaffe from this past weekend follows several instances that involved deceased people, from referencing conversations with people who died before he was born to asking where they were during events.
One such instance occurred at a Florida gathering in the fall of 2022 as Biden told supporters that he spoke with the man who “invented” insulin.
“How many of you know somebody with diabetes and needs insulin?” Biden asked the attendees. “Do you know how much it costs to make that insulin drug for diabetes? … It was invented by a man who did not patent it because he wanted it available for everyone. I spoke to him, OK?”
Insulin was co-discovered by Frederick Banting, who died in 1941, and John Macleod, who died in 1935. Biden, meanwhile, was born in 1942.
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Shortly before that, while speaking at a White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in September 2022, Biden appeared to scan the audience for the late Indiana Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski who died in a car crash in August 2022.
“I want to thank all of you here, including bipartisan elected officials like … Senator Braun, Senator Booker, Representative … Jackie, Jackie, are you here?” Biden said while searching for her. “I think she was going to be here to help make this a reality.”
The incident led to Republican lawmakers questioning his cognitive abilities.
“Joe Biden’s diminished capacity is so blatantly obvious that even the White House press corps couldn’t hide their concern,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told Fox News Digital at the time.
Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, who acted as a physician for Presidents Obama and Trump, called for Biden to take a cognitive test.
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“In yet another pathetic display of incompetence, Joe Biden not only thought my departed colleague was alive, but he also had his puppet-master, Karine Jean-Pierre, deny he was confused,” Jackson said in a statement.
“It doesn’t take a neurologist to realize he’s in serious cognitive decline,” he continued. “The American people know what’s going on here, and they don’t think the Commander-in-Chief is capable of doing his job.”
Biden has also repeatedly told an Amtrak story that has been hit with multiple fact checks due to the timelines not matching up, including comments at a 50th anniversary event for Amtrak in 2021.
“There was an article, I guess my fourth or fifth year as vice president, saying Biden travels 1,300,000 miles on Air Force One [Two]. I used to – the Secret Service didn’t like it – but I used to like to take the train home,” Biden said in 2021. “My mom was sick, and I used to try to come home almost every weekend as vice president to see her. I got on the train, and Angelo Negri came up and he goes, ‘Joey, baby,’ and he grabbed my cheek like he always did. I thought he was going to get shot. I’m serious. I said, ‘No, no, he’s a friend.'”
“He said, ‘Joey, what’s the big deal? 1,300,000 miles on Air Force Two? Do you know how many miles you traveled on Amtrak?’ I said, ‘No, Angie, I don’t know.’ He gave me the calculation, and he said you traveled 1,500,000 miles on Amtrak. The fact is, I’d probably take Angie’s word before I’d take the word of what the article said.”
However, this narrative doesn’t add up. Biden’s office didn’t celebrate him hitting 1 million miles on Air Force Two until 2015, which was a year after former Amtrak conductor Angelo Negri died. Biden also entered the fourth year of his term as vice president around 2013, and Negri’s obituary states he retired from Amtrak in 1993, while Biden was still a senator. Meanwhile, Biden’s mother, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan, died in 2010.
A couple of years before that event, when Biden ran for president in 2019, he told a group of donors that former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who died in 2013, was worried about the United States under Trump’s leadership.
Biden later rectified himself, explaining he meant to say British Prime Minister Theresa May. He chalked it up as a “Freudian slip.”
A White House spokesperson responded to Fox News Digital’s inquiry in a statement that said Biden has achieved “unprecedented results for the American people” and saying he has the “strongest economic and jobs growth in the world.”
“President Biden’s fighting every day to add to those results for families while many Republican officials are siding with fentanyl traffickers over the Border Patrol Union and quadrupling down on criticisms of the President that failed in 2020, 2022, and 2023 – except, that is, when it comes to entertaining headlines: ‘After Calling Joe Biden Senile, Republicans Complain He Outsmarted Them,'” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates wrote.
