US President Joe Biden confused a European leader with a deceased predecessor for the second time in a week, saying at a campaign event that he met Helmut Kohl four years after the German chancellor’s death.
The 81-year-old’s gaffe on Wednesday night came days after he said he had spoken to long-dead French President Francois Mitterrand, rather than current leader Emmanuel Macron, at the same summit. G7 in June 2021 where he said he had met with Kohl.
Biden, who is seeking re-election in November, often tells the same story about the summit held in the United Kingdom to illustrate what he said were global concerns about the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump.
“Helmut Kohl of Germany looked at me and said, ‘What would you say, Mr. President, if tomorrow morning you read the London Times and found out that 1,000 people had broken down the doors… of the British Parliament and killed some of them?’ (people) in the form of denying the prime minister the assumption of office,’” Biden said, according to a report from the group.
Angela Merkel, Germany’s first female chancellor, was the leader attending the summit. Kohl died in 2017 and served as chancellor for 16 years, from 1982 to 1998, becoming the architect of German reunification after the Cold War.
The confusion is the second in just a few days.
At a campaign event in Las Vegas on Sunday, Biden discussed French President Macron’s reaction to his 2020 election victory over Trump at the summit.
“And Mitterrand from Germany, I mean, from France, looked at me and said, ‘You know, why? How long are you back for?’” Biden said. A later White House transcript inserted the correct name, Macron, in parentheses.
Mitterrand was French president from 1981 to 1995 and died in 1996.
Polls show American voters are increasingly concerned about Biden’s age. She would be 82 years old at the beginning of a second term and 86 at the end.
Voters are less concerned about the age of Trump, 77, who is running for another term in the White House but has also made several mistakes.
He recently confused his rival for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, with former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. Last year she said that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was Turkey’s leader and warned that the United States was on the brink of “World War II,” which ended in 1945.
