Blundering Joe Biden has contradicted himself about where he was and what he saw in the aftermath of 9/11.
Speaking on Monday – the 22nd anniversary of the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – the President of the United States gave a different account to the one he gave in his autobiography. The 80-year-old now claims to have seen the fireball after a plane smashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
However, in ‘Promises to Keep’, he said that he merely saw “a brown haze of smoke”. The 2007 book also states that he went back to the Capitol in Washington to DC the “next day”. However, he now claims to have been in New York on September 12, 2001.
Speaking to US troops in Alaska, POTUS, said: “Ground Zero in New York — I remember standing there the next day and looking at the building. And I felt like I was looking through the gates of hell.”
Biden also said that he saw the immediate aftermath of American Airlines Flight 77 striking the Pentagon. He told the troops: “The plume of fire that shot up in the sky in Pentagon [sic] — I remember seeing as I got off the Amtrak train on my way to work in the United States Senate.”
However, in his 2007 book, Biden wrote: “I could see a brown haze of smoke hanging in the otherwise crystal-clear sky beyond the Capitol dome.” He also wrote: “I headed back to the Capitol the next morning.”
Perhaps tellingly, the book does not mention any trip to Ground Zero – let alone one on the day after the attacks, when a huge search and rescue operation work was still ongoing. Indeed, even then-president George W. Bush did not visit Ground Zero until two days later, on September 14, when he famously spoke to emergency works from a bullhorn and declared: “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
Biden’s book does, however, detail how he spoke to University of Delaware students on September 19, 2001 – and then visited a mosque in Newark, New Jersey on September 21, 2001. And contemporaneous news reports say that “Delaware Sen. Joe Biden spent Wednesday (September 12, 2001] exactly where he wanted — in the U.S. Senate” – which is based at The Capitol in Washington, DC.
It’s not the first time President Biden has appeared to embellish the truth for dramatic effect.
Just last month, while talking about the wildfires that have devastated Maui in Hawaii, he said that his Delaware house “almost collapsed” in a fire nearly two decades ago. He also claimed that firefighters “ran into flames” to rescue his wife Jill Biden, now the First Lady.
However, last year, after claiming “we almost lost a couple of firefighters” during the blaze, his local fire department released a statement calling the blaze “insignificant.”
And, back in 2021, Biden recalled “spending time at” and “going to” Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, after 11 people were murdered in the worst anti-Semitic attack in US history. However, the synagogue said Biden had never visited – and the White House later issued a clarification, that said the President was thinking about a phone call he with the synagogue’s rabbi a year later, in 2019.
Biden’s latest ‘misremembering’ comes as polls show voters, in the run-up to next year’s election, are concerned about the President’s mental acuity. A Washington Post-ABC News poll in June found that just 32% of voters think he has the mental sharpness needed to be president.
The same poll found that Donald Trump – three years younger than Biden at 77 – was considered more mentally astute, with 54% believing the former president and front-runner for the Republican nomination still has what it takes.
And, just last week, a Wall Street Journal poll found that 73% of voters believed Biden was too old to be President, while only 47% said the same of Trump.
Biden’s latest blunder comes just the day after he gave a bizarre press conference in Hanoi – and made an embarrassing gaffe about Good Morning Vietnam. The president has been circumnavigating the globe in five days as he returns to the US from the G20 summit in India.
