WASHINGTON — In a career that spans more than half a century, President Joe Biden has long been known all too well for mangling words, names and dates in verbal pratfalls known, perhaps gently, as gaffes.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, then-President Donald Trump publicly charged that Biden, then only 77, was suffering from “dementia.” The insult didn’t stick; Biden campaigned effectively enough to defeat Trump that November.
But the controversy over the president’s mental fitness has only intensified as he has sought a second term.
Biden’s age, as the oldest man ever to serve as president, inescapably weighs on voters’ minds.
Thursday’s report from special counsel Robert Hur deepened Biden’s political problem by painting a more damaging official picture of the president than had been seen before.
The report said Biden, now 81, came across as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
That may have been the nicest thing it said.
In his interviews with Hur, Biden had difficulty remembering which years he had served as vice president and what year his son Beau had died, the report said. His memory of a White House debate over Afghanistan, a subject on which he was once passionate, was hazy.
In response to one question, the president replied: “If it was 2013, when did I stop being vice president?”
Biden and his aides responded to the report with fury.
“I know what the hell I’m doing,” the president told reporters a few hours after the report’s release.
On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor, called Hur’s decision to include the details of Biden’s memory gaps “gratuitous” and “politically motivated” — a talking point other Democrats repeated throughout the day. (The special counsel is a Republican who was originally appointed by Trump.)
Aides suggested that Biden might not have been at his best when he met with Hur. They said he was focused on the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which had occurred only a few days before the interviews.
Still, as Biden demonstrated, the issue of his fitness threatens to surface every time he appears in public. On Thursday, in the news conference he called to defend his mental acuity, he misidentified the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico.
The question is present on both sides of the presidential campaign, since Trump, who turns 78 in June, would be the second-oldest man ever to win a major party’s nomination.
And Trump, too, often appears to suffer from memory lapses.
He recently confused Nikki Haley, his last remaining challenger for the GOP nomination, with Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic speaker of the House.
He referred to the president of Hungary as the president of Turkey.
He bragged last year that he had defeated President Obama in the 2016 election, when his opponent was Hillary Clinton, and claimed that he had won all 50 states that year (he won 30).
