Former President Donald Trump has made mocking President Joe Biden and questioning his mental fitness for office a core part of his campaign speeches – even as he experiences his own recent series of gaffes and verbal slips on the campaign trail.
“He’s always looking around, where do I go?” Trump said as he did an exaggerated impersonation of Biden walking around the stage looking confused at a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last month.
Weeks later, Trump took the stage in Sioux City, Iowa, and mistakenly thanked supporters for coming out to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, before an Iowa state senator tried to discreetly correct him — a moment that was caught on a hot mic.
During a summit in Washington, DC, Trump claimed that Biden could “plunge the world into World War II” – which ended nearly 80 years ago – and appeared to confuse Biden and former President Barack Obama, saying he was leading Obama in election polls.
The recent missteps have created an unwelcome wrinkle for Trump, his campaign team and the larger Republican political apparatus. Republicans have questioned whether Biden is able to serve as commander-in-chief, pointing to his age and mental fitness. But their own primary front-runner seems to be suffering the same predicament, making their argument less potent.
Trump incorrectly said Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, was the prime minister of Turkey – he quickly corrected that error. He has repeatedly mispronounced Hamas (huh-maas), the name of the Palestinian militant group that launched a deadly terror attack on Israel, as hummus.
And, during a rally in South Carolina in September, Trump confused former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of Trump’s 2016 GOP rivals, with his brother, former President George W. Bush
“When I came here, everyone thought Bush was going to win,” he said at that rally.
“They thought Bush because Bush supposedly was a military person… he got us into the, uh, he got us into the Middle East. How did that work out, right?”
Trump’s rivals have been working to capitalize on his latest set of unnecessary errors, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose presidential campaign has largely stalled under a barrage of attacks from the former president. DeSantis’ campaign also launched a “Trump accident tracker” recently to highlight the former president’s missteps.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who has seen a slight boost in recent poll numbers, appeared to take a jab at the former president over Trump’s foreign policy comments.
