President Joe Biden on Wednesday made the surprising claim that he’d had a conversation with former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that—given when it supposedly took place—could only have happened through a ouija board.
The Democrat said he spoke with Kohl, who died in 2017, at a 2021 meeting of G7 leaders in the U.K. Biden seemingly confused Kohl for Angela Merkel, the second time in a matter of days that the 81-year-old president appeared to have mistaken a European leader for one of their deceased predecessors.
Speaking at a New York fundraiser Wednesday, Biden claimed to have talked about the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot with Kohl four years after the German premier’s death.
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“And then Helmut Kohl turned to me and said, ‘What would you say, Mr. President, if you picked up the London Times and learned that 1,000 people had broken down the doors of the British parliament, killed some bobbies on the way in, to deny the prime minister to take office,” Biden said, according to Bloomberg. The outlet reported that he actually repeated the error at another Manhattan fundraiser later in the day.
What makes the slip-up even stranger is that Biden had made a similar mistake while talking about the same G7 gathering on Sunday. Speaking at a campaign rally in Las Vegas, he appeared to confuse French President Emmanuel Macron with François Mitterrand, the leader of France between 1981 and 1995. Mitterand died in 1996, a quarter of a century before the G7 summit.
“I sat down [at the meeting] and said: ‘America is back!’” Biden said. “And Mitterand from Germany—I mean, from France—looked at me and said… Said… You know, why… How long you back for?”
