US President Joe Biden deviated from scripted remarks commemorating the confirmation of future Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Thursday and stumbled through a puzzling anecdote in which he falsely claimed for the eleventh time to have traveled “17,000 miles” with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“America is a nation that can be defined in a single word: I was in the foothills of the Himalayas with Xi Jinping, traveling with him, that's when I traveled 17,000 miles when I was vice president,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “I don't know that for a fact,” he concluded.
A video of the remarks has racked up millions of views on Twitter in just hours.
One post said the episode showed “Biden's cognitive decline on display.” It’s just the latest in a series of incidents which numerous Republicans and independents say are lending further credence to suggestions that the president’s failing mental faculties may represent a serious threat to the US.
After Biden called for regime change in Russia in a widely-condemned ad lib last month, popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson labeled the president a “national security risk,” insisting that “as Joe Biden himself put it: for God's sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
Biden has long been known for his habit of embellishment, distortion, and other “gaffes,” and many argue it’s gotten worse with age.
In 2019, even the Washington Post acknowledged the obvious in an article headlined “Echoes of Biden’s 1987 plagiarism scandal continue to reverberate.” In 2020, Biden’s campaign aides were forced to walk back his claim that he’d been “arrested” while visiting Nelson Mandela and that the legendary South African dignitary subsequently “threw his arms around” Biden in gratitude. Among other falsehoods, he claimed to have once driven an 18-wheeler professionally and to have “had a house burn down with my wife in it.”