President Joe Biden‘s mental acuity has been cast under a harsh spotlight following repeated memory lapses and a report that labeled him a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden has mixed up living European leaders for dead ones three times within the last week, needed a reporter’s help to remember the name of the Hamas terrorist group, and then lapsed on another world leader while defending his memory.
Following the report into his handling of classified documents, the GOP was left both furious that Biden was not prosecuted and calling for his removal via the 25th Amendment, which would have to be initiated by Biden’s Cabinet.
“For the safety of our nation, Joe Biden must resign,” Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) posted on X. “He could not remember basic facts about his life. He is not competent to remain as Commander-in-Chief & every day that he remains, he puts America at risk.”
Earlier Thursday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described the incidents as a common occurrence.
“Many people, elected officials, many people can misspeak sometimes,” she said during Thursday’s press briefing, giving examples of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Fox News host Sean Hannity mixing up names and places.
But just minutes after the briefing ended, special counsel Robert Hur released his report on Biden’s handling of classified documents that set off calls from certain Republicans for Biden’s removal from office by way of the 25th Amendment.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
The report said that Biden struggled to remember what year he became vice president and what year he left the office, along with the year that his son Beau died.
“That does not describe someone who should be the Commander in Chief of our armed forces and the defender of American freedoms,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) wrote on X in reaction to the report. “It’s time for his cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment.”
Biden’s age has been a problem, particularly for his political opponents, since he entered the last presidential election in 2019. With the president now 81 years old and hoping to remain in office until he’s 86, the recent mixups are raising fresh questions.
Dr. Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist and a diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, said voters are right to worry if Biden is up to the job.
“This is a typical symptom of dementia,” she said of the European snafus. “The information is stored somewhere in his brain, and he’s calling it out at the wrong time in an inappropriate or inarticulate manner. He has bytes of information in his brain, and the wrong bytes get pulled out at the wrong time.”
The most recent spate of questions began when Biden confused current French President Emmanuel Macron with former President Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996. On Wednesday, he twice confused former German Chancellor Angela Merkel with her predecessor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017 and left political office in 1998.
And during a speech about the failed national security bill, Biden needed prompts from a reporter to remember the name of Hamas, the terrorist group that killed more than 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7 of last year.
After returning to the White House Thursday night, Biden gave a defiant press conference defending his memory, only to have it marred when he misidentified the presidents of Mexico and Egypt.
“I think as you know initially, the president of Mexico, Sissi, did not want to open up the gate to humanitarian material to get in. I convinced him,” Biden said, meaning to reference Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el Sissi.
Former President Donald Trump, Biden’s likely opponent in November, is not without his own questions about mental lapses. Most notably, he appeared to confuse former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at a rally.
Some mental health experts say the kinds of errors Biden and Trump made fit within the range of normal human cognition.
“It is not unreasonable to be concerned about the cognitive well-being of a political candidate, especially one with world-ending power at their fingertips,” Temple University professor Jamie Reilly said. “That said, the kinds of errors [Biden made mixing up European leaders] are also common in normal cognitive aging. These types of errors are often amplified when people are fatigued.”
In those cases, Biden had the correct names and titles, only erring with respect to the time they held the office. Similarly, Trump confused the names of two female politicians who have both strongly opposed him.
“Both errors have strong semantic relatedness but are staggered in time,” Reilly said. “This is the nature of a source attribution error.”
Biden has a decadeslong history of gaffes and has been known to repeat stories even after they have been debunked. For example, a perennial Biden favorite is the “Joey baby” story involving an Amtrak employee who informs him he logged more miles on Amtrak than on Air Force Two as vice president.
The Associated Press found that the employee retired in 1993 and died in 2014.
Voters will decide the question of whether Biden is mentally fit to serve another term in the White House. A Rasmussen Reports survey released Monday found that 59% of likely voters see Biden in mental decline.
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Trump being just four years younger than the president may take some of the sting out of that number. Otherwise, the White House says that Biden’s record as president is what matters.
“His leadership, his experience, I believe — we believe it speaks for itself,” Jean-Pierre said Thursday. “I think that’s what’s important. I hope that the American people see that.”
