DETROIT (LifeSiteNews) — Over the weekend, President Joe Biden appeared to suggest he was still vice president during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the latest instance of the elderly chief executive confusing facts and events with increasing frequency.
The New York Post reports that, while addressing a dinner hosted by the left-wing race group NAACP, Biden said, “When I was vice president, things were kind of bad during the pandemic and what happened was, Barack said to me, ‘Go to Detroit! Help fix it.’ Well, the poor mayor, he’s spent more time with me than he ever thought he’s gonna have to!”
Biden served in President Barack Obama’s administration from January 2009 to January 2017. The COVID pandemic began in 2020, the final year of the Trump administration, during which Biden was running for president. The Post speculates that Biden may have confused COVID with a trip he made to Detroit as vice president relating to the 2008 financial crisis, not a health emergency.
The Washington Times reports that the White House subsequently confirmed that theory, releasing amended remarks replacing the word “pandemic” with “recession,” while correcting nine other unrelated errors the president made in the speech.
At age 81, Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history, and throughout his presidency he has been hounded by concerns that he has been suffering cognitive decline. Biden has been famously gaffe-prone throughout his decades in politics, but recent years have seen a marked increase in odd and incoherent statements from the former senator and vice president, as well as moments in which he has appeared lost, confused, and prone to tripping.
Accordingly, Biden has been dogged by polls indicating that a large majority of voters considers him too old to continue as president, which when paired with deep dissatisfaction with his job approval has given Democrats great consternation going into the 2020 elections.
Polls currently indicate a razor-thin popular vote but a 303-235 victory for former President Donald Trump in the Electoral College, although voters also say that convictions in Trump’s various ongoing legal battles would make them less likely to support him. However, Biden’s aforementioned issues give him comparable electoral challenges, with no indication so far that Biden is willing to moderate on his least popular policies to compensate for them.
In recent years, many on both sides have bemoaned the trend of America’s top leadership positions being filled by individuals seen as too old to reliably perform their duties, including Biden (81), Trump (77), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (81), and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California (83).
The U.S. Constitution imposes minimum age requirements for presidents and members of Congress but no maximum age limits. A CBS News/YouGov poll released in September found that 77 percent of Americans, including 79 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats, would support cutoff points for elderly officeholders.