President Biden made several rambling, incoherent and flat-out odd statements in a string of July Fourth media appearances, including claiming he was the “first Black woman to serve with a Black president” and bizarrely insisting that traffic congestion is no longer a problem.
The appearances will likely do little to address questions about his age and mental acuity that threaten to sink Mr. Biden’s reelection campaign and were cemented in the minds of many after his widely panned debate performance June 27 against former President Donald Trump.
As part of the White House’s scramble to convince voters he’s still fit to lead the nation, the 81-year-old president struggled in an interview Thursday on WURD in Philadelphia, a Black radio station.
At one point, he was trying to talk about his work for former President Barack Obama as well as selecting Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate. But he appeared to conflate the two.
“By the way, I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, the first Black woman to serve with a Black president,” he told host Andrea Lawful-Sanders.
At another point in the interview, Mr. Biden claimed he was “the first president that got elected statewide in the state of Delaware when I was a kid.”
He also compared the struggle for Black freedom following the Civil War to his decision to run for president because he is Catholic. Mr. Biden said he wasn’t sure he could be elected because of the anti-Catholic bias that plagued John F. Kennedy more than 60 years ago.
At first, Mr. Biden said that his nomination of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court would mean a lot to “a young girl is in school and having trouble.”
“I looked at John Kennedy and said, “Well, he — John — he got elected. Why can’t I get elected?” Mr. Biden said in an odd aside. “People need to look things up.”
Mr. Biden’s appearance at the official White House Fourth of July celebration was even more puzzling as he greeted guests with a “Ho, ho, ho! Happy Independence Day.”
At the end of his remarks, Mr. Biden left the stage to a chorus of “Four more years!” but then returned and grabbed the microphone to claim traffic is no longer a problem.
“One last thing, I used to think when I was a senator, there were always congestion on the highway. There’s no congestion anymore. We go on the highway, there’s no congestion,” he said.
“And so what? The way they get me to stop talking, they’ll say, ’We just shut down all the roads, Mr. President, you’re gonna lose all the votes if you don’t get in. But anyway, I’ll be back out,” he said.
Earlier in his remarks, Mr. Biden talked about his recent trip to Normandy to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day. He began to segue into an attack on Mr. Trump before abandoning it.
He also referred to his rival Mr. Trump as “my colleagues.”
“By the way, I was in that World War I cemetery in France and one that my colleagues, the former president, didn’t want to go and be up there,” Mr. Biden said before saying he should not have made the comment.
Mr. Biden then claimed he was “in and out of battle” on the trip before stopping abruptly and saying, “Anyway.”
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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