During the speech President Biden gave at the North America’s Building Trades Unions National Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C., on April 24, 2024, President Biden drifted somewhat off course despite reading from a teleprompter, butchering the sentence by stumbling over the words. Predictably, online commenters were quick to call attention to the video and poke fun at the aging president.
That moment came when President Biden was attempting to discuss the “significant investments in climate” that his administration has been making. However, though he was reading from a teleprompter, he started stumbling over his words
In a very cleaned-up transcript of the sentence recorded by the White House Briefing Room, Biden said, trying to speak about those investments and losing track of what he was saying mid-sentence, “Trump and his MAGA allies want to repeal the most significant investments in climate ever — the work that — that you risked your lives doing lots of it. You know, it — and he wants to risk all those jobs. Are you surprised? I’m not.”
But the video of the president’s speech was significantly less clean than that, as the RNC Research X account, run by the Republican National Convention, drew attention to on X. Posting a clip of the awkward moment, it said, “Biden’s brain malfunctions mid-sentence — as he reads pre-written remarks from a giant teleprompter.”
Responding, others piled in with comments of their own. “Malfunctioning all over the place!” one said. Another noted that a person nearby had a quite negative reaction to Biden’s misstep, saying, “The guy’s face on the right. He’s cringing.” Still another joked, “At this point you can’t even call it a senior “moment” anymore.”
Yet another joked that Biden’s speechwriters would have to dumb down the speeches so that he could haltingly make his way through them, commenting, “Note to handlers and millennial speech writers. Smaller, fewer words with fewer syllables. Fewer speeches and more specific direction to the crowds on how to react.”
Watch Biden here:
Also during the speech, shortly before his brain malfunction, Biden repeated the lie that Trump told people to inject bleach to fight Covid during the pandemic. Doing so, he said, to the crowd’s laughter, “And, by the way, remember when he was trying to deal with COVID? He said just inject a little bleach in your veins. He missed; it all went to his hair.”
That came right after he attacked Trump for his anti-wind turbine stance, saying, “Well, folks, when I think climate, I think jobs. I think union jobs — good-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree. You’ve attracted nearly $700 billion in private-sector investment in advanced manufacturing, in semiconductors, clean energy, and so much more here in America, creating tens of thousands of good-paying jobs, Building Trades jobs. In fact, construction of new factories has more than doubled in our administration. Meanwhile — — meanwhile, Donald Trump still thinks windmills cause cancer. That’s what he said.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
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