President Joe Biden on Wednesday reportedly said he spoke at a 2021 meeting to a European leader who has been dead for years, a gaffe Biden has made multiple times in the past five days.
In several speeches this week, Biden has recounted a conversation he had with French president Emmanuel Macron and then-German chancellor Angela Merkel at the 2021 G7 summit months after his inauguration. But on Wednesday he twice confused Merkel with Helmut Kohl, who served as Germany’s chancellor from 1982 to 1998 and died in 2017, according to Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich, who posted a pool report excerpt on X.
“And 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 there’s 1,000 broken-down doors of the British Parliament, killed some on the way in, to deny the next prime minister to take office?’ And you think, what would we think?” Biden said, referencing the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Biden reportedly told the same story at his next event that day, again saying that he talked to Kohl, rather than Merkel.
Wednesday’s gaffes come after he gave a Sunday speech in which he confused Macron for François Mitterrand, who served as France’s president between 1981 and 1995 before he died in 1996.
“I sat down, and I said, ‘America’s back,’ and Mitterand from Germany—I mean, from France—looked at me and said, … ‘How long you back for?'” Biden recounted.
Also this week, Biden appeared to struggle to remember the name of Hamas when he took a Tuesday question about negotiations between Israel and the terror group.
Americans have long expressed concerns about Biden’s fitness for the job of president, given his age. In an Associated Press poll from late August last year, 77 percent of respondents said his age made him unable to “effectively serve” another term. A Wall Street Journal poll released a week later found that 73 percent of voters believed he was too old to run for president.
