For the second time in a week, Joe Biden mistakes a dead leader for a living one

Polls show U.S. voters increasingly worried about Biden’s age

Washington:

For the second time in a week, US President Joe Biden confused a European leader with his late predecessor, saying at a campaign event that he met Helmut Kohl four years after the German chancellor’s death.

The 81-year-old lost his temper Wednesday night, days after saying he had spoken to long-dead people French President François MitterrandAt the same G7 summit in June 2021, where he stood in for current leader Emmanuel Macron, he said he met Kohl at the summit.

Biden, who is seeking re-election in November, often told the same story for summits in Britain to illustrate what he said was global concern about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump.

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“Germany’s Helmut Kohl looked at me and said, ‘Mr. President, what would you do if you picked up the London Times tomorrow morning and learned that 1,000 people broke into… the British Parliament and killed some people? said?) is denying the prime minister the opportunity to take office,” Biden said, according to a joint report.

Angela Merkel, Germany’s first female chancellor, was among the leaders attending the summit. Kohl, who died in 2017, served as chancellor for 16 years from 1982 to 1998 and was hailed as the architect of post-Cold War German reunification.

Polls show American voters are increasingly worried about Biden’s age. He was 82 years old when his second term began and 86 when it ended.

The White House downplayed the name mix-up, noting that Biden has met with many world leaders during his long career as a senator, vice president and finally president.

“Elected officials, a lot of them, sometimes say the wrong thing,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at a news conference.

“It happens. It happens to all of us.”

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However, it was the second time in as many days that Biden confused dead and living leaders.

At a campaign event in Las Vegas on Sunday, Biden addressed French President Emmanuel Macron’s reaction to his defeat of Trump at a 2020 election summit.

“Mitterand, who is from Germany – I mean, from France – looked at me and said, ‘You know, why – how long have you been back?'” Biden said. Later White House records inserted the correct name of Macron in parentheses.

Mitterrand served as President of France from 1981 to 1995 and died in 1996.

To make matters worse, Biden referred to Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as “the president of Mexico” in a televised address Thursday night, in which he was speaking in part to defend his memory.

American voters appear to be less worried about the 77-year-old Trump, who is running for another term in the White House, but he has made some mistakes.

Trump has recently conflated Nikki Haley, a rival for the Republican nomination, with Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat and former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Last year, he called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban the leader of Turkey and warned that the United States was on the brink of “World War II,” which ended in 1945.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)