Biden mixes up Germany’s Angela Merkel with late Helmut Kohl

WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden mistakenly referred to a conversation he had with Angela Merkel in 2021 as having taken place with the late German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, on Wednesday night, his second such mixup this week.

At a New York reception that raised money for his reelection bid, the 81-year-old Biden changed a story that is a staple of his stump speech to include Kohl instead of Angela Merkel, who was in power at the time of the reported conversation, the G7 summit in 2021.

The reference occurred when Biden was talking about the Jan 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination this year.

“When I first got elected president, I went to a G7 meeting with the seven heads of state in Europe and Great Britain. I sat down and I said, ‘Well, America’s back’ and the president of France looked at me and said, ‘for how long?’ I never thought of it this way,” Biden said.