In a nationally televised address on Thursday, an evidently irate Joe Biden, President of the United States, denied having issues with his memory. This follows a special prosecutor’s report that portrayed him as “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” However, during his speech, he made a fresh blunder when he mixed up the presidents of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Egypt, Abdelfatah al Sisi.
“I am well-intentioned, I am elderly, and I am fully aware of what I am doing,” stated Biden, who expressed his intention to run for re-election in the upcoming November general elections. “As president, I will restore this country,” he added.
He insisted that his memory is intact and expressed his displeasure about the report noting that he forgot the date of his son Beau’s demise. “How dare he?” he exclaimed from the diplomatic reception room of the White House.
However, he made a noticeable error towards the end of his speech, which was in stark contrast to his earlier assertions. He mistakenly referred to the president of Mexico as the president of Egypt. “As many of you know, originally, the Mexican president, Sisi, was reluctant to open the entryway for humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. I talked to him, persuaded him,” he stated, seemingly unaware of his slip-up.
Joe Biden has recently been involved in numerous mix-ups, and this is far from being a solitary incident. For instance, on Wednesday night, he confused former German Chancellor Angela Merkel with her predecessor Helmut Kohl, who passed away in 2017.
While narrating an anecdote about the G7 meeting in Cornwall, where the Capitol invasion was discussed, the 81-year-old president mentioned — while speaking at a New York fundraiser on Wednesday — that “after stating that the United States has recovered, German Helmut Kohl turned to me and asked: ‘Mr. President, what would you do if you woke up tomorrow, opened the Times, and read that 1,000 individuals had stormed the parliament?’”
Previously, on Sunday, he referred to a supposed conversation he had in 2021 with former French president François Mitterrand, who passed away in 1996, confusing him with Emmanuel Macron.
The 81-year-old U.S. president has committed a number of public gaffes.
In July 2023, he mistakenly stated that “more than 100″ Americans had died from Covid-19. The White House later amended this figure to “More than a million”.
In June, he confused the conflict in Ukraine with that in Iraq, asserting that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “losing the war in Iraq.”
