Biden freezes before Medicare, jobs gaffes minutes into CNN debate with Trump

President Biden froze and then had a verbal blunder, saying he “beat Medicare,” minutes after he kicked off his debate with former President Donald Trump on Thursday and touted the “15,000 new jobs” he created as commander-in-chief.

The 81-year-old president was discussing his record on the economy when he appeared to lose his train of thought.

“We be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do, child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, with the COVID, excuse me, dealing with everything we have to do with…,” Biden said before freezing for several seconds.

“We finally beat Medicare,” he continued.

“He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death,” Trump, 78, responded.

The blunder was Biden’s second of the night.

During his response to the first question of the CNN debate, when he was asked about what he would say to voters who feel worse off under his presidency, Biden said: “[The] unemployment rate rose to 15% [under Trump], it was terrible. And so what we had to do is try to put things back together again. That’s exactly what we began to do.

“We created 15,000 new jobs,” he added, possibly meaning to say “15 million new jobs.”

Biden’s propensity to misspeak has resulted in more than 150 adjustments to official White House transcripts of his remarks this year alone, including nine in one day after he delivered a gaffe-riddled speech to the NAACP in Detroit in May. 

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The commander-in-chief referred to the NAACP as “the NAAC,” called Capitol rioters “irrectionists,” announced that he was “humbled to receive this organization [he meant ‘award’]” and said he was vice president “during the pandemic” during that particular slip-up spree. 

Weeks earlier, during a ritzy campaign fundraiser at the Westchester home of Hollywood stars Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, the president fumbled the date of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol — a key event in Biden’s re-election pitch.

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“We’ll certainly never forget the dark days of June 6,” Biden said, before self-correcting: “January 6th, excuse me. One of the dark days in history.”

The president’s verbal blunders have also come during high-profile events, such as his State of the Union addresses. 

“Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks,” Biden declared less than a week into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, during his first State of the Union speech in March 2022. 

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“But he will never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people.”

His inadvertent rallying cry for the people of Iran led Vice President Kamala Harris, who was seated behind Biden, to mouth “Ukrainian” as the president forged ahead with his speech. 

In his 2024 State of the Union speech, Biden once again stunned listeners when he went off script to acknowledge the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. 

 “I know how to say her name. Lincoln — Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal,” Biden said, both botching the slain student’s name and using a term considered politically incorrect by most Democrats.

Just in the last year, the commander-in-chief has also flubbed the names of current and former leaders of Mexico, Egypt, France, Germany and Ukraine. 

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Last July, Biden referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “Vladimir” during a NATO summit in Lithuania, apparently confusing him with Russian leader and US and Ukrainian adversary Vladimir Putin. 

In February, Biden mixed up Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador during a news conference at which he defended himself from accusations in former special counsel Robert Hur’s report that he had a “poor memory.”

“As you know, initially, the president of Mexico, Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in [to Gaza],” Biden said as he answered a question from a reporter about the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.

“I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.”

That same week — on three separate occasions — the president told an audience that he discussed the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol with European leaders who were actually dead at the time.

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He told Democratic donors in New York, at two different events, on Feb. 7 that he spoke about the riot with former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose death pre-dates the event by nearly half a decade, when he apparently meant to say former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. 

“Helmut Kohl said, ‘Joe, what would you think if you picked up the phone and picked up the paper tomorrow and learned in the London Times, on the front page, that 1,000 people stormed the Parliament, broke down the doors of the House of Commons and killed two bobbies in the process … trying to stop the election of a prime minister?’” Biden said at one of the fundraisers, switching it up to “Helmut Kohl of Germany” during the telling of a nearly identical anecdote at the other event.

Kohl died in 2017.

Biden stumbled through the same story days earlier, on Feb. 4 in Las Vegas, with one of the only differences being that he recalled former French President Francois Mitterrand presenting him with the hypothetical.  

Mitterrand died in 1996. 

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Biden apparently meant to say current French President Emmanuel Macron.

More recently, the president has appeared to momentarily freeze up in public. 

Earlier this month, he had to be led offstage by former President Barack Obama at the end of a campaign fundraiser in Los Angeles. 

As Biden and his former boss stood for applause, the octogenarian president’s gaze seemed to become fixed on the crowd for a full 10 seconds until Obama took him by the wrist and escorted him behind the curtains. 

Just days earlier, during a lively Juneteenth musical performance at the White House, Biden remained virtually motionless for nearly a minute as the vice president, the second gentleman and other dignitaries on the South Lawn all danced around him.  

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Biden was only roused when Philonise Floyd, the brother of the late George Floyd, wrapped his arm around the president. 

Hur noted in his February report on Biden’s handling of classified White House documents that Hur opted against recommending criminal charges against the president in part because a jury might view Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

Biden couldn’t recall the years he served as Obama’s vice president or when his son Beau Biden died, according to Hur’s report.

In September 2022, the president searched out then-recently deceased Indiana Rep. Jackie Walorski during an event in Washington, saying, “Jackie — are you here? Where’s Jackie?” despite the fact that he had publicly mourned Walorski’s high-profile death the previous month.

“I think she was going to be here,” Biden added. 

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White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed Biden’s confusion, claiming that the late congresswoman was “top of mind” for the president. 

More recently, Biden’s bizarre behavior during the G7 summit in Italy earlier this month reportedly shocked US allies.  

Biden gave Giorgia Meloni an awkward salute upon greeting the prime minister of the host nation, and later wandered away from his fellow world leaders during a skydiving demonstration, forcing Meloni to chaperone him back to the group.

Public polling over the past year has consistently shown that large majorities of voters are concerned about Biden’s mental fitness for office.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released Wednesday found that 70% viewed the president as too old to be effective in office, including a majority of his supporters. 

Meanwhile, only 40% felt the same about former President Donald Trump, who is 78. 

Biden, the oldest president in American history, would be 86 by the end of a second term in the White House.