Biden now claims he spoke to second dead European leader in gaffe-prone campaign week

First Mitterrand, now Kohl: President Joe Biden has confused meetings with two late European leaders this week

In his second blunder of the week, President Joe Biden has now claimed he spoke to another dead European politician in a campaign event speech.

The 81-year-old president appeared at a series of campaign fundraiser events in New York on Wednesday, where he declared that he had discussed the January 6 Capitol riots with Chancellor of Germany Helmut Kohl, during a G7 meeting in the UK in 2021.

“And then Helmut Kohl turned to me and said, ‘What would you say, Mr President, if you picked up the London Times and learned that a thousand people had broken down the doors of the British Parliament, killed some bobbies on the way in, to deny the prime minister to take office,”’ Mr Biden said.

He echoed the blundering story at another event the same day.

The only issue is that Kohl had already been dead for four years at that point, passing away in 2017 after retiring from active politics in 2002.

Mr Biden appears to have been trying to refer to another former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, who was in office at the time back of the apparent 2021 conversation.

This isn’t the first Euro mix-up that Mr Biden has made this week, after he also made another gaffe when trying to refer to French President Emmanuel Macron – instead referring to Francois Mitterrand.

Biden and Merkel attended the G7 summit in Cornwall, UK together in 2021 (Getty Images)

Mitterrand, who was the former president of France and has been dead for almost three decades, was brought up by Mr Biden in a campaign speech on Sunday in Las Vegas during another G7 meeting anecdote from 2021.

“Mitterrand from Germany — I mean, from France — looked at me and said, ‘You know, what ... why … how long you back for?” Mr Biden said.

Mr Biden’s gaffe was corrected on the official White House record, which published his remarks with the name “Mitterrand” crossed out and replaced with “Macron”.

This week’s gaffes are far from his only ones.

One of his notable blunders was when he professed Russian President Vladimir Putin was “losing the war in Iraq” in June, seemingly confusing the war in Ukraine with the war in Iraq that ceased in 2011.

His gaffes have not made it past his Republican rival Donald Trump, who said in an event in October that the president “can’t put two sentences together and he’s in charge of nuclear warfare.”

Mr Trump, 77, also trolled Mr Biden last month with a spoof advert depicting the White House as a “senior living” establishment where “residents feel like presidents”.

Yet the former president and Republican candidate has not gone without his own mistakes throughout his campaign, the latest of which occurred last month when he appeared to mix-up his only Republican challenger Nikki Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi while discussing the January 6 Capitol riots.

Mr Biden later mocked Mr Trump for the gaffe, writing on X: “I don’t agree with Nikki Haley on everything, but we agree on this much: She is not Nancy Pelosi.”

It’s not only the two presidential hopefuls that have been calling each other out for their recent confusions, as an NBC News poll that was carried out last month found that 76 per cent of voters have concerns over Mr Biden’s mental and physical health, with 48 per cent feeling the same way about Mr Trump.