President Biden referred to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as the president of South Korea on Friday in his latest gaffe involving world leaders.
Biden, 81, was in the middle of attacking his 2024 opponent, former President Donald Trump, over his close relationship with the dictator when he made the blunder.
“We’ll never forget his love letters for the South Korean President Kim Jong Un or his admiration for Putin — what a great leader Putin is,” the president said during remarks at a campaign reception in Portola Valley, Calif.
Biden’s mistake comes just over a year after he hosted South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol at the White House for a lavish state dinner.
The pair also spent time together last August during a summit at Camp David.
Biden is no stranger to gaffes involving the names of world leaders.
In fact, Friday’s faux pas was not even his first involving the South Korean president.
Biden stumbled over Yoon’s name in May of 2022 during a trip to South Korea, referring to him as “President Moon” in remarks after touring a Samsung micro-chip facility.
Yoon’s predecessor is former President Moon Jae-in.
Just in the last year, the commander in chief has also flubbed the names of current and former leaders of Mexico, Egypt, France, Germany and Ukraine.
Last July, Biden referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “Vladimir” during a NATO summit in Lithuania, apparently confusing him with Russian leader and US and Ukrainian adversary Vladimir Putin.
In February, Biden mixed up Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador during a news conference where he defended himself from accusations in former special counsel Robert Hur’s that he had a “poor memory.”
“As you know, initially, the president of Mexico, Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in [to Gaza],” Biden said as he answered a question from a reporter about the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. “I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.”
That same week – on three separate occasions – the president told an audience that he discussed the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol with European leaders who were actually dead at the time.
He told Democratic donors in New York, at two different events, on Feb. 7 that he spoke about the riot with former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose death pre-dates the event by nearly half a decade, when he apparently meant to say former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
“Helmut Kohl said, ‘Joe, what would you think if you picked up the phone and picked up the paper tomorrow and learned in the London Times, on the front page, that 1,000 people stormed the Parliament, broke down the doors of the House of Commons and killed 2 bobbies in the process … trying to stop the election of a prime minister?’” Biden said at one of the fundraisers, switching it up to “Helmut Kohl of Germany” during the telling of a nearly identical anecdote at the other event.
Kohl died in 2017.
Biden stumbled through the same story days earlier, on Feb. 4 in Las Vegas, with one of the only differences being that he recalled former French President Francois Mitterrand presenting him with the hypothetical.
Mitterrand died in 1996.
Biden apparently meant to say current French President Emmanuel Macron.
The shocking string of gaffes are among numerous verbal blunders he’s committed since taking office, which have sparked concerns over his mental acuity as he seeks a second term in the White House.
Biden, the oldest president in American history, would be 86 at the end of his second term if re-elected in November.
