Biden confuses Macron with Mitterrand (who died in 1996)

U.S. President Joe Biden confused Emmanuel Macron, the current French president, with François Mitterrand, who led France from 1981 to 1995 and died in 1996.

In a speech at a campaign rally in Las Vegas, while telling a story about the G7 summit that took place in England in June 2021 and which Macron attended, Biden said: “Right after I was elected, I went to a G7 meeting in southern England. And I sat down and said, ‘America is back!’ and Mitterand from Germany — I mean France — looked at me and said, ‘How long you back for?'”

It wasn’t the first recent slip of the tongue by the 81-year-old U.S. president. In July 2023, he accidentally said “over 100” Americans have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic broke out. The White House later rectified this to “over 1 million.”

In June, Biden — who is running for reelection and is set to face Republican challenger Donald Trump in a November rematch of the 2020 vote — had confused the war in Ukraine with that in Iraq, saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “losing the war in Iraq.”

“It’s hard to tell, really. But he’s clearly losing the war in Iraq. He’s losing the war at home, and he has become a bit of a pariah around the world,” Biden said.