In a baffling moment of historical confusion this week, President Biden made headlines with yet another public gaffe involving late European leaders. At fundraising events in New York on Wednesday, the President erroneously recounted past dialogues with former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who passed away in 2017, sparking a wave of fact-checking and disbelief.
The President was busy with a trifecta of campaign receptions when he launched into his retrospective discussions about the January 6 Capitol events during his initial G7 summit attendance in June 2021. He detailed an exchange in which he claimed Chancellor Kohl questioned him about his reaction to a hypothetical attack on the British Parliament to obstruct the appointment of a new prime minister.
However, it was not Chancellor Kohl, who died four years prior to these events, but former German Chancellor Angela Merkel who attended the elite annual meeting. The recent memory lapse mirrors an unrivaled slip from this past Sunday where President Biden appeared to imply he had conversed with François Mitterrand, the French president who died in 1996, at that same G7 meeting.
Addressing an audience in Las Vegas, Biden recounted asserting “America’s back” on the global stage, followed by his mistakenly attributing a response to “Mitterrand from Germany — I mean from France,” only to correct himself mid-story. Whether a slip of the tongue or a momentary error, the President’s historical mix-ups have become subjects of scrutiny and conversation.
