Biden confuses living politicians with late counterparts in recent speeches
1:06 PM EST, February 8, 2024
On Wednesday, February 7, 2024, at a presidential campaign meeting, Joe Biden mistakenly referred to the late German Chancellor Helmut Kohl instead of former Chancellor Angela Merkel. The US President recounted a conversation that supposedly took place in 2021.
As reported by Sky News, during a fundraiser in New York, Biden conveyed conversations he claimed to have had with European leaders amidst the G7 meeting in Cornwall in 2021, a few months after the January riots at the Capitol.
The US President claimed that Helmut Kohl (who passed away in 2017) had asked him how he would react if he found out about a raid on the British Parliament and a subsequent attack on officers.
However, the discussion involved Angela Merkel, the former Chancellor of Germany, who was attending the summit at the time.
The aforementioned mix-up happened just days after Biden confused Francois Mitterrand, the former French president who died in 1978, with the incumbent leader, Emmanuel Macron.
On Monday, at an election gathering in Las Vegas, Biden retold the same story as on Wednesday, describing the reactions of the French and German leaders during a G7 meeting after the Capitol riots on January 6th.
In recalling his conversation with Macron, he not only misidentified him as Mitterrand, but initially stated that Macron was from Germany. However, he quickly rectified his mistake. Mitterrand served as the French president from 1981 to 1995.
