- Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ended questions about Biden’s gaffe.
- “I’m not even going to go down the rabbit hole with you,” she said Tuesday.
- Republicans want to highlight stumbling as a sign of declining health.
The White House on Tuesday rejected questions about President Joe Biden’s fitness for office, a day after the president claimed he had recently spoken with the French head of state who died in the 1990s.
The incident occurred during a speech in Las Vegas in which Biden reflected on his 2021 conversations with world leaders in the United Kingdom.
“I said, ‘America is back,'” he recalled.
“And Mitterrand from Germany, France, looked at me and said, ‘How long have you been back?'”
In fact, President François Mitterrand died in 1996. FOX News’ Peter Doocy pointed this out to Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during a regular White House press briefing the next day, when he asked her how she would respond to the approximately three-quarters of the public’s concern about the president’s concerns. As I said. physical and mental health.
Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to get drawn into questions about Joe Biden’s health, a day after he claimed he had recently spoken with the late French president from the 1990s.
“I’m not even going down that rabbit hole with you, sir,” was her short reply.
When Doocy countered that it wasn’t a rabbit hole, she expanded on her answer by pointing to Biden’s recent hectic travel itinerary.
“You saw the president in Vegas, California,” she said. “You’ve seen the president in South Carolina. You’ve seen him in Michigan. Leave it at that.”
The episode only emphasized Biden’s aging. At 81 years old, he is already the oldest president in history and is running for the next term, which will serve him until he is 86 years old.
A DailyMail.com poll last year found that 70% of voters think Biden is too old to be president. That includes more than half of Democrats, illustrating the challenges he faces during his campaign for a second term.
Each gaffe, fair or unfair, is seen as an impediment to his ability to do his job due to his age.
In fact, he spoke to President Emmanuel Macron, not Mitterrand, at the 2021 summit, a failure compounded by Biden’s background in foreign affairs.
He knows Macron, who was elected in 2017 at the age of 39, well. Macron is the youngest president in French history and the youngest French head of state since Napoleon.
Mr Biden also met Mr Mitterrand when the future US president was a young senator.
French President François Mitterrand visited the Bay Area in 1984. Mr. Biden met Mr. Mitterrand during his long career, but they certainly didn’t pass each other in Britain in 2021.
Mr. Biden is well acquainted with current French President Emmanuel Macron (pictured). He is the youngest president in French history and the youngest French head of state since Napoleon.
In a survey of likely 2024 voters last year, about 49% of Democrats agreed that Joe Biden is too old to be president.Only 28% believe he is the right age
Mitterrand took office in 1981, when the current French president was three years old.
As chairman of the European Affairs Committee, Biden met with Mitterrand in January 1988 to discuss the Treaty on the Prohibition of Soviet Nuclear Weapons.
Mitterrand served as president until 1995, when he died a year later at the age of 79.
Biden’s confusion is just the latest gaffe for the famously worldly president, who stuttered as a child and has described himself as a “gaffe machine.”
He has repeatedly said that his son Beau died in Iraq, not at Walter Reed, and that he confused the ongoing war in Ukraine in June 2023 with the Iraq war that ended in 2011.
He asserted that President Vladimir Putin is “clearly losing the Iraq war.”