President Joe Biden appeared to have temporarily lost his train of thought while discussing the crisis in Afghanistan and his administration’s decision to withdraw last spring.
“There is no way we were ever going to unite Ukraine -I mean excuse me Iraq -Afghanistan,” Biden said, speaking to NBC News’ Lester Holt in an interview taped Thursday.
“Look, there is no good time to get out, but if we had not gotten out, [the generals] acknowledged we would have had to put a hell of a lot more troops back in,” Biden added, saying that the pullout was “a much wiser thing to do.”
Biden went on to get testy with his interviewer, shooting down a question about the definition of “temporary” inflation by suggesting Holt was “being a wise guy with me a little bit,” but adding that he understands that “that’s your job.”
The Afghanistan exchange, taking place in the space of a few seconds, was quickly disseminated on social media, sparking abuse from Biden’s detractors and apparent genuine concern from others whether the exchange was evidence of cognitive decline. “What a joke. Everybody in the world is laughing at us,” one user wrote. “What about the parts of the interview they AREN’T showing us?” another asked. “NBC aired this? Wow,” a third chimed in.
“Leave him alone. He has a stutter. A very rare stutter that makes him say random and incorrect things constantly and it only really started like 2 years ago, maybe 3, but he’s had it his whole life,” one observer wrote. “People say ‘back off, it’s just a stutter problem’. Yes, but it’s also a sign of dementia and senility and a green light signal to our foes ‘if ever there was a good time to take advantage of America…now is the time’,” another suggested.
Others, however, pointed out that inadvertently or not, “the president is correct in his assessment about all three countries.”
Others still went after Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, recalling that the Republican once “claimed there were airports during the Revolutionary War.”
Biden’s mental fitness is a subject brought up regularly by officials and media figures since the 2020 presidential primaries. The 79-year-old, a survivor of two brain aneurisms, stressed in January that he had “no idea” why up to half of Americans see him as mentally unfit, with his wife Jill calling on critics to lay off her husband.
This week, a group of GOP lawmakers sent Biden, his physician and chief medical advisor letters urging the president to immediately undergo a cognitive test and share the results with the American people after he called a reporter a “stupid son of a b*tch” after being asked a question on inflation.