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Joe Biden at the Nato meet mistakenly called Ukraine’s Volodymr Zelenskyy Vladimir Putin. Hours later, he referred to his vice president as Donald Trump instead of Kamala Harris. These recent gaffes and his disastrous debate performance have made many wonder if the US president is mentally fit to run the country. But what do experts note on the 81-year-old’s verbal slips: Are they a sign of old age or something worse? read more
 "Are verbal gaffes signs of declining mental fitness?")
Amid concerns of his mental acuity, US President Joe Biden referred to Ukraine President Volodymr Zelenskyy as Vladimir Putin during the Nato summit. Reuters
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Joe Biden declared at the Nato summit in Washington while introducing Ukraine’s Volodymr Zelenskyy. “President Putin!”
At the announcement of “Ukraine Compact,” a new initiative to bolster aid to Kyiv in its ongoing war with Russia, US President Joe Biden welcomed Zelenskyy when he said: “I want to hand it over to the President of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination — please welcome President Putin.”
On the same night, President Biden flubbed again at his “big boy” solo press conference when he referred to his vice president as Donald Trump. “Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president [if] I think she’s not qualified to be president,” Biden said.
Joe Biden misidentifies Vice President Kamala Harris as Donald Trump, during a high-stakes press conference, saying: "Look I wouldn't have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if she was not qualified to be president. So start there"
This comes hours after Biden… pic.twitter.com/t2ZcpUEbtl
While Zelenskyy laughed off the mistake, the fumbles are part of a long list of gaffes Biden has committed, making many question if he is indeed well enough to run for president again and secure a second term against Donald Trump.
It’s a question that many, if not all, are asking: When does a verbal flub become a cause for genuine cognitive concern?
Biden’s many, many flubs
On Thursday, in an attempt to calm concerns about his mental acuity, Joe Biden held a press conference which was closely watched by all. Apart from the Trump-Harris flub, he had many more similar instances.
One was when the commander-in-chief said, “I’m following the advice of my commander-in-chief.” Sometimes, his voice also trailed off with an “anyway”. He also defaulted to his strange whispering habit.
And this isn’t all. He has a long list of howlers, making many question if he is capable of running the country again. At the first presidential debate on June 27, he was seen losing his train of thought and even stumbled on some issues. At one point, his opponent, Donald Trump, said: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Earlier on June 18, at an immigration event, the 81-year-old US president seemed to temporarily forget the name of Secretary of Homeland Security only to recover a bit later.
In September last year, Biden was rambling mid-sentence in Hanoi. It was then that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre intervened and told reporters: “Thank you, everybody, this ends the press conference.” Moments earlier, the president had quipped: “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go to bed.”
Similarly, in June last year, he referred to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as “president”, then corrected himself with a joke: “I just promoted you.”
When Biden visited Israel in 2022, he said at Jerusalem’s famed Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Centre: “I will once more return to the hollow ground of Yad Shav… — Vashem to honour the six million Jewish lives were stolen in a genocide.
“And continue — which we must do every, every day — continue to bear witness, to keep alive the truth and honour of the Holocaust” – before correcting himself to say “horror of the Holocaust” instead.
During his 2022 State of the Union address, Biden tried to give a ringing rhetorical boost to embattled Ukraine, but accidentally praised Iran instead. “Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks,” the president declared, less than a week after Russia launched its invasion. “But he will never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people.”
Concerns over Biden
While the earlier flubs were laughed off or ignored, the recent instances of Biden mispronouncing or rambling have become a concern for Democrats, Biden supporters as well as American voters.
Several Democrats have called on President Biden to drop out of the race against Donald Trump, starting with Lloyd Doggett, a 15-term Texas congressman, who said that it was time for Biden to “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw”. He has since been followed by others, including Democrat senator, Peter Welch of Vermont, who said: “We need him to put us first, as he has done before. I urge him to do it now.”
Also read: Debate debacle: What happens if Joe Biden drops out of the 2024 US presidential race?
Other prominent names have also joined in the chorus, asking Biden to vacate the race to the White House, including donor and Hollywood superstar George Clooney . Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, also said, “I want him to do whatever he decides to do,” adding that “time is running short” for him to make that call.
Many have even called for President Joe Biden to take a cognitive test to determine the level of his mental acuity.
Several donors have also expressed concern over Joe Biden and are publicly withdrawing their support and calling for him to be replaced. Among the many donors, Abigail Disney who is an heiress to the Disney family fortunes has said that she intends to stop her funding to the Democratic party, if Biden does not step down.
Experts speak
But is Biden’s flub just a sign of old age or something more? Some dementia experts say such slips, on their own, are no cause for concern. Dr Zaldy Tan, who directs the Memory and Healthy Ageing Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, told NPR: “We’ve all had them. “It’s just that we are not public figures and therefore this is not as noticeable or blown up.”
Additionally, memory lapses become more common with age, even in people whose brains are perfectly healthy. Dr Sharon Sha, a clinical professor of neurology at Stanford University concurs with this assessment, saying the temporary inability to remember names, in particular, “is very common as we get older”.
Other neurologists are also of the opinion that forgetting names or having difficulty remembering dates from the past are just a part of ageing. Dr Paul Newhouse, clinical core leader for the Vanderbilt Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centre, speaking to NBC News said, “If you asked me when my mother passed away, I couldn’t necessarily tell you the exact year because it was many years ago.”
He added that this type of forgetfulness doesn’t actually predict who ends up having memory disorders.
Dr Dennis Selkoe, co-director of the Ann Romney Centre for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, was quoted as saying, “Naming proper nouns is not an adequate basis to make a conclusion about whether an individual has a more consistent and more concerning substantive progressive memory disorder.”
Other neurological experts note that they tend to worry less about a patient’s ability to remember remote memories from many years ago and more troubled by an inability to recall more recent events. This is because, in their opinion, dementia first affects the part of the brain that’s responsible for short-term memories, as opposed to long-term memories.
Dr Elizabeth Landsverk, a geriatrician and dementia expert, told DailyMail.com that Biden’s mishaps tend to be short and severe — such as tripping up stairs or memory-blanking. And he usually catches his mistakes, however embarrassing they may be, which she claims is a sign of his very senior years.
Daniel J Stone, an internist and geriatrician in Beverly Hills, in a report for the Los Angeles Times wrote that most older people suffer from age-associated memory impairment. “It’s a nuisance but not disabling.”
He wrote that he believes that Biden shows no signs of Alzheimer’s disease. “At news conferences, he references new events and obviously creates new memories efficiently. He speaks slowly and pauses to find words like others with benign age-associated memory impairment.”
Andrew Budson, a Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine professor of neurology, told Boston University: “When one is talking spontaneously in public, it uses that type of high-speed cognitive ability that is done in their head. As mentioned, older adults are just not as good at this type of activity, and are therefore more likely to make errors.”
However, not all share the same opinions. Representative Dr Greg Murphy, who has been a physician, said many individuals succumb to cognitive decline. “Tragedy, two weeks ago, when we saw the president of the United States exhibit those qualities of decline of cognition.”
Even forensic psychologist Carole Lieberman told the Washington Examiner that based on her observations of Biden on television, she believed that dementia is a strong possibility.
“If I had to take a guess, I would say that it is vascular dementia because he has long had cardiovascular problems,” Lieberman said. “He had a brain bleed years ago from an aneurysm. He had atrial fibrillation.”
Another commentator, Robert Howard, a geriatric psychology specialist at the University College of London, however, observes that Biden’s gaffes appear to be more aligned with Parkinson’s because they appear more sporadically. “He’s fine 98 per cent of the time, but there are occasions when he appears to have lost his train of thought and others where he can’t stop himself from rambling. These fluctuations and dips in attention are key symptoms of Parkinson’s,” Howard told Washington Examiner.
Whatever the case be, calls for Biden to step aside are growing louder and it remains to be seen if the 81-year-old commander-in-chief accedes to them or does he continue in the race to the White House.
With inputs from agencies
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English (US) ·