President Joe Biden delivered a forceful speech Thursday in France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landing, warning that “democracy is not guaranteed” and “the price of unchecked tyranny is the blood of the young and the brave.”
MAGA trolls reacted by accusing the president of pooping in his pants.
While many observers’ attention was focused on the president’s address honoring the last living veterans of the invasion of Normandy, the rapid response social media team of the Republican National Committee was instead preoccupied with Biden briefly crouching before taking a seat.
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In a 13-second clip posted to social media, the president is seen shaking hands with French President Emmanuel Macron before turning toward first lady Jill Biden. He then slightly squats down while reaching for something behind him. The brief video ends with an announcer welcoming Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to the stage while Jill Biden appears to whisper something to her husband.
“Awkward,” the RNC Research account captioned the video, alongside a grimacing face emoji.
Pro-Trump influencers and right-wing provocateurs quickly ran wild with the misleadingly edited clip, claiming it was definitive proof that the president had soiled his trousers.
Dave Rubin, the “ex-lefty turned shitposting Trump stan,” wondered whether Biden was “pooping or sitting in an invisible chair,” adding a poop emoji to his tweet to hammer home the message.
Dispensing with Rubin’s “just asking questions” framing, beanie aficionado and far-right podcaster Tim Pool blared “HE POOPED” and “HOLY SHIT” in all caps, claiming that the president needed to quickly leave the ceremony to clean himself up.
Breaking911, a junk news X (formerly Twitter) account that boasts a million followers, helped spread the narrative to the MAGA masses by reposting the clip with the caption: “Did Biden shit his pants AGAIN?” That would appear to be in reference to a baseless 2021 claim that the Vatican had to cancel a livestream of Biden’s meeting with Pope Francis because the president had a “bathroom accident.”
Other prominent right-wing media personalities asserted that “there’s no way Joe is not pooping himself here” and “Biden just pooped his diaper,” much to the delight of their millions of social media fans.
The reality of the situation, though, is far less messy.
A couple of seconds after the clip the RNC shared online ends, the president locates the chair behind him and takes a seat alongside the rest of the contingent on stage. Taken in context, Biden seems neither out of place nor in the midst of a bathroom emergency.
The moment in question starts at the four hour and 16-minute mark in the video below:
In fact, it was after this so-called accident or confusion over an “invisible chair” that the president delivered his emotive address while juxtaposing the historic war against the Nazis with the current battles against authoritarianism.
“In their generation, in their hour of trial, the Allied forces of D-Day did their duty,” Biden declared. “Now the question for us is, in our hour of trial, will we do ours?”
The president’s speech received some plaudits from conservative pundits. Bill McGurn, a former George W. Bush speechwriter and Fox News contributor, said Biden “looked in command” and delivered the speech “very well” with “no major stumbles.”
But while some Fox News analysts were praising the speech, the conservative cable giant also ran wild with the RNC Research clip to insist that the president is suffering from “spatial disorientation” and that he “appeared confused” on the stage in Normandy.
“Are we going to see another scene where he’s up on that dais, and he didn’t know whether he should stand or sit, as we saw earlier today?” Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner wondered on Thursday morning. “Look, this isn't a pick-on-the-president moment, this is a point-out-the-frailty moment. This is a point-out-the-acuity-gaps moment.”
In a since-deleted tweet, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro alleged that the president was “trying to sit in an imaginary chair,” claiming it was evidence that the “lights on, but Biden’s not home.” She added that “embarrassing is an understatement” because “THERE IS NO CHAIR!”
The network’s mockery of Biden’s supposed confusion was also framed within the context of The Wall Street Journal’s recent 3,000-word investigative report that he “shows signs of slipping” behind the scenes, feeding into the GOP’s narrative that the 81-year-old president is cognitively impaired.
The WSJ article has not only been pilloried by Democrats and liberals, who have labeled it “comically weak,” but also by mainstream media journalists. CNN senior reporter Oliver Darcy lambasted the Journal for largely relying on Republicans to draw “their sweeping conclusion” about the president’s mental fitness.
“It is difficult to imagine that the newspaper, or any outlet, would run a similar story declaring that Trump is ‘slipping’ behind the scenes based on the word of top Democratic figures—despite the fact that the Democratic leadership has demonstrated a much stronger relationship with the truth in recent years than their Republican counterparts,” Darcy noted.
