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US President Joe Biden: “Then Helmut Kohl looked at me”

Photo: Mandel Ngan / AFP

US President Joe Biden once again mixed up dead and living heads of state at a fundraising event for his election campaign. On Wednesday evening, he shared an anecdote from a conversation at the 2021 G7 summit in the UK. He reported on a conversation with former Chancellor Helmut Kohl. However, he had already been dead for four years at that point; Kohl died in 2017. Biden was probably referring to Angela Merkel, who was in office at the time.

The story about the conversation following the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 by supporters of then-President Donald Trump is a staple of the 81-year-old Biden's campaign speech. But this time something went wrong.

»When I was first elected president, I went to a G7 meeting with the seven heads of state from Europe and Great Britain. I sat down and said, 'Well, America is back,' and the French president looked at me and said, 'For how long?' I had never seen it like that before," Biden said. Everything was still right then. But after that, Biden's description went wrong: "Then Helmut Kohl from Germany looked at me and said: 'What would you say, Mr. President, if you picked up the London Times tomorrow morning and found out that 1,000 people were smashing through the doors of the British "We broke into Parliament and killed some people on the way there," said Biden.

The mistake comes just a few days after Biden confused the current French President Emmanuel Macron with his predecessor François Mitterrand, who died almost 30 years ago, and then referred to him as the head of state of Germany. This was also about a conversation at the G7 summit, but from 2020.

In a White House transcript, Mitterrand's name is crossed out and replaced with Macron in brackets. Accordingly, Biden said: "And Mitterrand - Macron, from Germany - I mean, from France, looked at me and said: 'You know what - why - how long have you been back?'"

Biden, the oldest sitting president of the United States, has had similar public outbursts on several occasions. But his competitor Donald Trump, 77, has also misidentified people. He recently confused his Republican opponent Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was Speaker of the House of Representatives when he was in office.

czl/Reuters