On the 80th Anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy, France, President Biden attended a ceremony alongside French President Emmanuel Macron and their respective wives. The event featured speeches from President Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and others. Roughly 200 surviving veterans from the successful Allied invasion were also present.
However, a clip of President Biden at the function has gone viral on social media, where some suggested that President Biden was having “another malfunction,” adding to a long list of public gaffes and blunders throughout his administration.
A clip of the event shows Biden standing beside First Lady Jill Biden and President Macro before bending over and appearing to sway up and down in a hunched position as Lloyd Austin was being introduced. The video has sparked speculation from conservative critics of the president, speculating what he was doing in the brief video.
However, others have claimed the video was taken out of context and “deceptively” edited to make the president’s actions appear more awkward than they actually were. The full video shows Biden sitting down in his chair seconds later, where he appeared to begin sitting down preemptively before Austin was fully introduced.
Whether this recent Biden moment was taken out of context or not, there is a pervasive opinion among voters that the president is too old to serve. Polling from ABC News/Ipsos discovered that 86 percent of Americans believe Biden should not serve another term because of his age.
Furthermore, the findings of Special Counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, expressed concerns about the president’s age and memory when recommending to nor pursue criminal charges.
Hur Wrote, “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory . . . It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties of a serious felony that requires a mental state.” Watch Biden at the D-Day Memorial below:
The special counsel’s conclusion continued, “In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”), He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama. In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall.”