Biden jokes about nuclear football, calls Trump ‘congressman’ in gaffe-filled Colorado stop
President Biden stunned listeners Wednesday by bragging about his ability to launch nuclear weapons — before calling Donald Trump a “congressman” and seeming to forget the names of the current Chinese and South Korean leaders.
“Now look, my Marine carries that, but it has the code to blow up the world,” the 81-year-old commander-in-chief said while introducing himself to factory workers in Colorado.
“This is not nuclear weapons, is it?” Biden added while touring South Korean company CS Wind’s facility in Pueblo, touted by the White House as the largest wind tower manufacturer in the world.
Moments later, Biden blundered through a 23-minute speech as polls show large majorities of voters are concerned about his mental acuity as he seeks re-election.
“I am friends with your leader, Mr. Moon, you know,” Biden told corporate leaders — appearing to refer to former South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who left office in 2022.
The current South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, has interacted with Biden at many events and even was honored by Biden in April at his second state dinner since taking office.
The errors continued as the president invoked Trump in what had been advertised by the White House as a planned attack on Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) for opposing Biden-backed economic bills.
“We can use [a billionaire minimum tax] to strengthen the Social Security and Medicare system instead of cutting them like Congressman Trump and Boebert want to do,” Biden said.
Trump, 77, opposed the efforts of some fellow Republicans to alter Social Security during his presidency and is the GOP front-runner to face off against Biden again in next year’s election.
In a yet another possible stumble, Biden reminisced about what he said was a conversation with the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who died in 1997 and is best-known for liberalizing China’s economy to introduce elements of capitalism in the late 1970s and ’80s.
“I said this to Deng Xiaoping in the Himalayas and I’ve said this to every world leader: It’s never, never, never been a good bet to bet against the American people,” the president said.
The story resembled a frequently told Biden anecdote involving what he claimed was a conversation with current Chinese President Xi Jinping during their respective vice presidencies.
At another point in his speech, Biden claimed to have “cut the federal deficit by over $7 billion” — likely a slipped-up telling of his more frequent claim to have cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion, which at one point was true but only when factoring in a blip in COVID-19 and stimulus spending.
The national debt is currently more than $33.8 trillion — up more than $6 trillion since Biden took office — and fiscal year 2023, which ended Sept. 30, saw the highest non-pandemic deficit in US history at $1.7 trillion.
Biden’s nuclear football joke went viral Wednesday on social media alongside his series of gaffes at the same stop.
Presidents are famously accompanied while traveling by a military aide carrying a briefcase with items that can be used to authorize a nuclear attack — including a card that contains authentication codes.
Although Biden’s defenders argue he’s simply gaffe-prone, fellow Democrats have expressed alarm at his recent public errors.
David Axelrod, the former chief campaign strategist to President Barack Obama, said this month that “in front of the camera, what he’s projecting is causing people concerns, and that is worrisome.”
A New York Times poll released Nov. 7 found 71% of swing-state voters say Biden is “too old to be an effective president,” while just 39% said the same of Trump.
A Wall Street Journal poll released in September found that 73% of registered voters believed Biden was too old, versus 47% who said the same of Trump.
