Donald Trump was quick to pounce on one of President Joe Biden’s verbal flubs late Thursday, leveraging a glaring mistake to his advantage.
Moments after finishing his scripted speech, Biden mistakenly referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump,” shocking the crowd of reporters as well as some of his Cabinet members in attendance.
“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president [inaudible] think she was not qualified to be president, so let’s start there,” Biden said.
Moments later, Trump was resharing a clip of the slipup to his Truth Social page, mocking the president’s inability to keep his characters and facts straight.
“Crooked Joe begins his ‘Big Boy’ Press Conference with, ‘I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president, though I think she was not qualified to be president,’” Trump wrote, intentionally misquoting what Biden said. “Great job, Joe!”
Trump also took advantage of several other verbal lapses Biden had while responding to members of the White House press corps Thursday evening, including a moment when he stumbled over referring to his chief of staff of the military, and when he slurred the words “intelligence community” and “declassified.”
The easy punches from Biden’s opponent follow a NATO summit in which diplomats and world leaders watched and worried over Biden’s mental fitness, and his subsequent ability to win over the American public and maintain the threatened international alliance. Meanwhile, back at home, Democratic lawmakers are weighing whether to formally rescind their endorsement from Biden as their presumptive presidential nominee.
Even within Biden’s campaign, staffers are reportedly looking for other options: On Thursday, a leaked report revealed that the campaign was quietly polling voters on Harris’s odds, should she take the top of the ticket in a direct match-off against Trump. The leaked poll didn’t include its results, but other polls assessing Harris’s viability have indicated that she would have a slight advantage over Biden.
