Biden's latest slip-up mentions chat with the German chancellor, who passed away in 2017

Biden's latest slip-up mentions chat with the German chancellor, who passed away in 2017
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2:59 PM EST, February 8, 2024

The presidential election is fast approaching, and the candidates for president of the United States are busy with many meetings with voters. In one of them, President Joe Biden made quite a mistake by recalling a conversation with a politician who had long been dead.

On Wednesday, Joe Biden attended campaign events in New York, where he met with his voters due to the elections, which will be held in November 2024. However, he made a colossal blunder when he told a story from his first G7 meeting in 2021.

He referred to the conversation, which, as he said, was with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. "And then Helmut 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", said Biden, quoted by Politico.

The only problem in this story is that Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor from 1982 to 1998, passed away in 2017, four years before the mentioned G7 meeting. Apparently, Biden did not mean Kohl, but Angela Merkel, who was serving as Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021.

This is not Biden's first such a gaffe. Moreover, another one took place just a week ago, when the American President, similarly telling a story, confused current French President Emmanuel Macron with the former president of this country, François Mitterrand, who died in 1996. This blunder occurred in Las Vegas and also concerned the 2021 G7 meeting. "Right after I was elected, I went to a G7 meeting in southern England. And I sat down and said, ‘America is back!’ and Mitterand from Germany — I mean France — looked at me and said, ‘How long you back for?", said Joe Biden.

Sources: Fox News, Politico, NBC News

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