As voters head into 2024, at the top of their minds is the sharpness of their candidates. That could be tough for President Joe Biden after a series of flubs this week has prompted renewed criticism about his mental acuity and whether he is fit for office.
France
Biden first came under criticism during a campaign event in Las Vegas on Sunday when the president told supporters an anecdote from a G7 meeting he attended shortly after being elected. However, the president mistakenly referred to French President Emmanuel Macron as Francois Mitterrand, the former president of France who died in 1996.
“And Mitterrand from Germany — I mean, from France,” he began, quickly correcting himself to the right country, “looked at me and said … ‘You know, what — why, how long you back for?’”
The White House later published the remarks, but with the name “Mitterrand” crossed out and replaced with “Macron.”
Germany
Scrutiny toward Biden only intensified days later when he appeared to confuse former German Chancellors Angela Merkel and Helmut Kohl while telling a story at another campaign event on Wednesday.
Biden recalled another G7 meeting that occurred shortly after the Jan. 6 riot, during which the president said, “Kohl turned to me and said, ‘What would you say, Mr. President, if you picked up the London Times and learned that 1,000 people had broken down the doors of the British Parliament, killed some bobbies on the way in, to deny the prime minister to take office.'”
Kohl died in 2017, four years prior to the meeting. Merkel attended the 2021 summit.
Egypt
Biden made his third flub of the week on Thursday when he incorrectly referred to the president of Egypt as the “president of Mexico” during an impromptu press conference to admonish a special counsel report challenging his memory.
When asked a question about the war in Gaza, Biden responded that “initially, the president of Mexico, El-Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.”
Abdel Fattah El-Sisi is the president of Egypt.
The most recent slip-up came under the most intense scrutiny as it happened just hours after the Department of Justice released the findings of an investigation into whether Biden mishandled classified documents. Although the report did not result in criminal charges, the special counsel cited several instances in which the president had bouts of forgetfulness — describing Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
The report describes instances in which Biden couldn’t recall “when he was vice president” or “even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
The report prompted intense criticism from Republicans, who pointed to the findings as evidence the 81-year-old president is not fit to serve another four-year term.
“Among the most disturbing parts of this report is the Special Counsel’s justification for not recommending charges: namely that the President’s memory had such ‘significant limitations’ that he could not convince a jury that the President held a ‘mental state of willfulness’ that a serious felony requires,” House Republican leaders said in a joint statement. “A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office.”
The White House pushed back against the characterizations of Biden’s memory in the special counsel report, lamenting the descriptions were cheap shots being thrown in an election year.
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“We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate,” the White House wrote in a letter. “The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events. Such comments have no place in a Department of Justice report.”
Republicans have long pointed to Biden’s age and mental acuity as ripe for attack on the campaign trail, calling attention to the president’s legacy as the oldest sitting president in U.S. history. Those concerns have also been reflected in the polls, as a majority of voters have expressed concerns about Biden’s mental and physical health.
