August 11, 2019

Ending a Week of Blunders, Joe Biden Remembers Something That Never Happened

He said he met with Parkland survivors as VP.

header image of Biden in Iowa

John Locher/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Speaking to reporters in Iowa on Saturday, Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden said that student survivors of the shooting in Parkland, Florida, “came up to see me when I was vice president.” Except they didn’t. The Parkland shooting took place in 2018, more than a year after Biden left office. 

Biden did meet with Parkland students shortly after the shooting. But a campaign official later clarified to Bloomberg that the candidate was thinking of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting at the time he misspoke. 

This wasn’t a one-off gaffe, either. He said the same thing on stage at a gun control forum, also on Saturday.

The mistakes capped off a week of slip-ups on the part of the 76-year-old politician. During an August 4 fundraiser, Biden misstated the timing and locations of the August 3 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, and the August 4 rampage in Dayton, Ohio, referring to them as “the tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan the day before.” Then, during a speech on Thursday, he declared, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids,” before catching himself and quickly adding, “wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids.”

Two days later, after widespread criticism over the “white kids” gaffe, Biden told reporters, “Look, I misspoke.” But the same day at the Iowa State Fair, according to Politico, he went for a ride on an epistemological tilt-a-whirl, saying of Americans in general that “we choose truth over facts.” That last slip-up caused a reaction from President Donald Trump, who questioned Biden’s mental fitness: 

It scarcely needs to be pointed out that Trump, 73, is not exactly Pericles himself in front of a microphone. He has founded the nonexistent country of “Nambia” and dispatched the Continental Army into the airports during the Revolutionary War, just to mention a couple mistakes. And, like Biden, he even messed up the location of one of last weekend’s mass shootings, stating during a televised speech that it took place in Toledo, Ohio, rather than Dayton. 

Biden is the Democratic frontrunner for now, raising the specter of a general election showdown in which neither candidate can get from subject to predicate without spraining an ankle. 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate