President Joe Biden has been making mistakes for years and will continue to do so, one of his top advisers warned Friday.
“Joe Biden has been making mistakes for 40 years. He made a couple last night and he’ll probably keep making mistakes,” said Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler.
He was asked about the brutal gaffes Biden made at NATO on Thursday, including portraying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin” and calling Vice President Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump.”
Acknowledging that more blunders are coming is either a brilliant political strategy or simply accepting reality. Biden has made mistakes since he arrived in the White House and shows no signs of changing.
President Joe Biden’s campaign said the 81-year-old would continue to make mistakes
The White House did not address other contentious issues when it briefed reporters traveling to Michigan on Friday for the president’s campaign event in the critical battleground state.
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment on whether Biden has spoken to former President Barack Obama since his disastrous debate performance.
Former Obama advisers are among those working to pressure Biden to drop out of the presidential race, and Obama reportedly received a tip from George Clooney that the actor was writing an op-ed calling for Biden to resign.
The campaign also did not address questions about Biden’s work habits after a report that the president told governors he would stop working at 8 p.m.
“No one is going to work harder to defeat Donald Trump than the President of the United States, Joe Biden,” Tyler said.
“We’ll continue to sit down for interviews,” Tyler added.
Biden himself rejected that report at a press conference on Thursday.
“That’s not true,” he said, laughing. “Look, what I said was that instead of starting every day at seven and going to bed at midnight, it would be smarter if I took a little bit more time,” Biden said.
Biden said it would be better, for example, to move a fundraiser up an hour. “If you start at 8, people go home at 10,” he said.
Mistakes, however, remain a central theme for Biden’s campaign.
They have a way of sticking in voters’ minds that could obliterate any other message. By adopting them, the campaign could be resorting to a “that’s Joe Biden” strategy.
And they are an unfortunate stumble for the 81-year-old president who is trying to convince voters that he has the mental capacity for a second term in office.
Several top Biden advisers were in the front row of his news conference when he called Harris “Trump” and had a sharp, visible reaction.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and national security adviser Jake Sullivan were on camera when the president made the mistake.
Sullivan raised his hand to his mouth and Blinken dropped his gaze sadly, as if staring into space, as the president poured gasoline on his re-election chances.
Only Austin seemed to control his gaze, staring unblinkingly at the commander in chief and even attempting to nod slightly in agreement.
But Biden, who overcame a childhood stutter, has a history of making gaffes throughout his more than 40 years in politics.
He has confounded world leaders before.
In February, Biden wrongly claimed to have met François Mitterrand, who died in 1996, at the 2021 G7 summit.
That same week, he said he had spoken to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, about the January 6 riots, which occurred in 2021.
In September 2022, Biden, at a White House event, called Rep. Jackie Walorski, who had died in a car accident the previous month.
—Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?
The White House defended him, saying it had Walorski in mind.
On other occasions, the president has mumbled and fumbled for words, as he did in the first presidential debate.
The mistakes date back to his years as vice president.
In September 2008, Biden was at an event in Missouri where he called out a state senator.
“I hear State Senator Chuck Graham is here. Stand up, Chuck, let them see you. God bless you. What am I talking about? I’ll tell you what: you’re making everybody else stand up, man,” he said.
Graham was in a wheelchair.
The White House did not say whether President Biden has spoken with Barack Obama (above) since the presidential debate.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken (left), Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan struggled to contain their reactions to a Biden gaffe
White House aides have been accused of carrying out a three-and-a-half-year plot to hide Biden’s shortcomings from the press and the world.
The ailing 81-year-old’s closest staff deployed a multitude of tactics to hide his shortcomings: limiting reporters’ access to him, giving the president smaller staircases for Air Force One and physically surrounding him in public to hide his stiff walk, a former Biden aide told DailyMail.com.
Biden has also been given large-print cards with the most basic instructions written on them for nearly every event and has been kept on a stricter daily schedule so he can get more sleep.
There were even staff tasked with devising strategies to prevent the president from falling, the source said.
But at his Thursday night press conference, Biden made clear he will remain in the race.
He noticed The only way he would leave is if his staff “came to me and told me there was no way I could win.”