President Biden’s latest mix-up, this one involving a dead French president, is just one in a string of similar occurrences in recent years.
On Sunday, Biden told a Las Vegas crowd he met with François Mitterrand, a French president who has been deceased for 28 years. Biden made the blunder while retelling the story of a gathering with French President Emmanuel Macron at a G7 meeting shortly before he entered the Oval Office.
“I sat down, and I said, ‘America’s back,'” Biden told the crowd. “And Mitterrand from Germany – I mean from France – looked at me and said …”
Biden then assembled his thoughts to complete the sentence: “Well, how long are you back for?”
Mitterrand, to whom Biden had referenced, was France’s president from the early 1980s to mid-1990s and died in early 1996.
Biden’s gaffe from this past weekend follows several instances that involved deceased people, from referencing conversations with people who died before he was born to asking where they were during events.
One such instance occurred at a Florida gathering in the fall of 2022 as Biden told supporters that he spoke with the man who “invented” insulin.
“How many of you know somebody with diabetes and needs insulin?” Biden asked the attendees. “Do you know how much it costs to make that insulin drug for diabetes? … It was invented by a man who did not patent it because he wanted it available for everyone. I spoke to him, OK?”
Insulin was co-discovered by Frederick Banting, who died in 1941, and John Macleod, who died in 1935. Biden, meanwhile, was born in 1942.
