Joe Biden has been caught in another bizarre lie, this one related to the date of his birth and the day one of his grandfathers died.
“My grandpop, who I never met - he died in the same hospital I was born in two weeks before I was born. But my grandpop was from - as they say in Maryland, from ‘Balmer’,” Biden said, speaking at the North American Building Trades Unions (NABTU) conference in Washington on Tuesday while telling an anecdote about how America’s gas station infrastructure was built in the 1920s and 1930s.
But fact checkers quickly pointed out that President Biden’s paternal grandfather, Joseph H. Biden, died on September 26, 1941 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Ambrose Joseph Finnegan, Biden’s grandfather from his mother’s side, died on May 27, 1957 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Joe Biden, meanwhile, was born on November 20, 1942 at St. Mary’s Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania, meaning whatever way you cut it, his story just doesn’t add up.
It’s not clear what the president hoped to accomplish with his ‘born in the same hospital’ story, but it’s far from the first time he’s been caught in an odd an odd predicament related to falsehoods about family members.
At a military veterans event in Delaware in December, Biden claimed he attempted to present his uncle Frank Biden with a Purple Heart while serving as vice president for the relative’s bravery during World War II, and that uncle Frank refused to accept the medal. But Frank Biden died in 1999, while Joe Biden was serving as a senator. President Biden further claimed that he tried to give his uncle the medal on the insistence of his father, Joseph R Biden Sr. But Biden’s father died in 2002.
In October and November 2022, Joe Biden twice forgot about how his oldest son Beau Biden had died, claiming in speeches that he perished in the Iraq War, although in reality Beau died in 2015 at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington after a battle with brain cancer.
Along with these falsehoods, the president has sparked concerns about his mental state over his regular flubs and odd mannerisms, from shaking hands with invisible people, to praising the brave “Iranians” fighting Russia in Ukraine, to blaming the world’s inflation crisis on “the war in Iraq,” to pushing British Prime Minister Rishi Sanuk out of the way to shake hands with other officials during a recent trip to Northern Ireland.
Biden formally announced plans to run for a second term on Tuesday. Donald Trump, presently Biden’s top rival among the Republican field, blasted the president and suggested that “with such a calamitous and failed presidency, it is almost inconceivable that Biden would even think of running for reelection."