Although neither President Joe Biden nor his loved ones have confirmed the president’s mental decline, his latest remarks on Friday only lent further to widely-held suspicions of his poor cognitive state.
Biden displayed a cognitive slip when he made mention of former congresswoman Gabby Giffords during his visit to Arizona on Friday. The president flew in to issue a formal apology to the Gila River Indian Community and all Native Americans on behalf of the United States government for the Indian boarding schools of yesteryear. At the opening of his remarks, Biden referred to Giffords in the past tense as if she were dead.
“Thank you to Senator Mark Kelly, a great friend who also was married to an incredible woman who was my friend,” said Biden.
It is unclear whether Biden erroneously believed that Giffords passed away recently or during the assassination attempt against her in 2011.
The president’s most recent memory lapse adds to a long list of similar incidents over the course of his term, a number of which have been called out as falsehoods, such as falsely claiming he was at Ground Zero the day after the September 11 attacks, fabricating the memory of a conversation with a black Amtrak conductor, misremembering when his mother died by years, and misremembering the death date and location of his grandfather and his own birth date and location.
Earlier this year, DOJ special counsel Robert Hur concluded that Biden was an “elderly man with a poor memory” in declining to prosecute him over a classified documents case. Specifically, Biden was unable to remember the exact time frame when he served as vice president, and couldn’t recall when his late son, Beau Biden, passed away.
Biden’s apology made him the first U.S. president to apologize for the boarding schools — though his apology was fraught with stumbling, stuttering, and throat-clearing. The president struggled to pronounce “Gila Indian River Community” at the beginning of his remarks.
“And to the Gila Indian River Community… the Gila, uh, Gila, uh nothing wrong with me — Gila River Indian Community for welcoming me today,” said Biden.
Biden also criticized the United States for its relations with the Indians in founding the country and expanding. Biden made no mention of the violence that Americans endured at the hands of certain Indian tribes, or the intertribal that reshaped the country’s landscape over the centuries preceding the pilgrims and colonists.
“As time moved on, respect for tribal sovereignty evaporated, was shattered, pushing Native people off their homelands, denying their humanity and their rights, targeting children to cut their connection to their ancestors and their inheritance and their heritage,” said Biden.
Biden claimed that the Indian boarding schools represented “one of the most horrific chapters in American history,” and said that Americans were ignorant and “should be ashamed.” Biden said that physical, sexual, and emotional abuse were the rule, not the exception, for those schools.
“It’s horribly, horribly wrong, it’s a sin on our soul,” said Biden. “I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did. I formally apologize.”
