President Joe Biden looked lost again on Thursday, April 14, 2022, after finishing a speech on the nation’s ongoing supply chain crisis when he turned around and stuck his hand out as if to shake hands – but there was no one else on stage.
The 79-year-old president claimed before the handshake fiasco that he had served as a ‘full professor’ at the University of Pennsylvania despite never teaching a class at the school, in yet another gaffe that has Republicans questioning Biden’s cognitive abilities.
Last week, Biden looked disoriented during an event that saw former President Barack Obama visit the White House for the first time since leaving office.
Footage from the Thursday event shows Biden ending the speech in Greensboro, North Carolina, with the signoff ‘God bless you all’ before turning to his right and seemingly saying something to the empty space behind him and miming a handshake.
The Democrat proceeds to frantically look around the stage with a bewildered look on his face before beginning to wander aimlessly around the crowded auditorium.
He then bizarrely turned his back to the audience, looking lost on the stage as music rolled, marking the speech’s conclusion.
The strange behavior from Biden – the latest of several brain lapses by the president in recent years – instantly sparked a firestorm online, with many, including Texas Senator Cruz, 51, pointing to the politician’s most recent display of possible cognitive deterioration.
In a post published minutes after the speech’s conclusion, Cruz re-shared the clip of Biden – the oldest-ever US president – with a caption that included a wide-eyed emoji.
Others called Biden’s actions at the end of the speech ‘elder abuse’ and questioned his mental state.
‘Where are the White House and Biden family handlers whose job it is to make him look good?’ wrote Harmeet K. Dhillon, former vice chairwoman of the California Republican Party following the display.
‘This is truly bizarre,’ the Republican lawyer went on, ‘unless they WANT him to look like a dementia patient.’
Politician Robby Starbuck, who is running for Congress in Tennessee’s upcoming Republican primary, remarked: ‘Oh man. The music makes it 10x worse. This man is unfit to be President. Period.’
The president had been visiting Greensboro to see North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University as part of an effort to apply pressure on Congress to approve the Bipartisan Innovation Act, which aims to increase funding for domestic production of semiconductors.
He again blamed the record-high inflation on Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.
‘What people don’t know is that 70% of the increase in inflation was the consequence of Putin’s Price Hike,’ he said.
Inflation soared to a 41-year high of 8.5 percent in March, according to the latest figures from the Labor Department. The Consumer Price Index increased 1.2 percent in March just from the previous month.
The speech also saw Biden bizarrely claim that he used to be a ‘full professor’ at the University of Pennsylvania.
‘I’ve been at a lot of university campuses, matter of fact for four years, I was a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.’
Biden, from nearby Delaware, was named Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor, the first person to hold the role, in 2017. He did not teach regular classes but made about a dozen public appearances on the campus, mostly at big-ticketed events, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. He collected a pay check in 2017, 2018, and early 2019.
In all, Biden reaped nearly $1 million from the university after being given a vague role and teaching no regular classes.
Six months out from the midterm election, Biden is increasing his domestic travel schedule with competitive states on the agenda. In addition to North Carolina on Thursday, Biden was in Iowa on Tuesday. He’s scheduled to travel to North Carolina next Tuesday.
‘Our economy created 431,000 jobs in the month of March alone,’ he said, adding that he’s created ‘7.9 million jobs over the course of my presidency, more jobs in the 14 months I’ve been president than any president ever created in American history.
He added that North Carolina has created 194,000 jobs in the last 14 months.
But questions remains as to whether voters will buy Biden’s jobs argument. The president’s approval rating has cratered as inflation keeps rising.
His approval rating hit an all-time low on Wednesday, according to a Quinnipiac poll, which revealed that only 33 percent of respondents believe Biden is doing a good job as president.
The concerning display from the president – who has come under fire for repeated lapses that have seen him confuse Libya and Syria and mistakenly call Vice President Kamala Harris ‘president’ – comes just nine days after he looked lost during Obama’s return to the White House as reporters flocked to the former president, leaving Biden alone to wander aimlessly.
During the event, which saw Obama deliver a speech to thunderous applause, the former president was seen shaking hands with fans and fellow politicians in the East room, while Biden wandered around looking confused.
In another clip, Biden was seen standing behind Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris as they shook hands with people, while he watched on – with no one seemingly paying the president any mind.
The clip has since garnered a marked online reaction, with many questioning – and even pitying – the president’s seemingly diminishing state.
One person tweeted: ‘I almost feel bad seeing this,’ while another person tweeted: ‘The man who purportedly got 80 million votes…but can’t find a single friend in a crowded room’
Another pityingly asserted that people should have come up to Joe out of respect: ‘Sad, you can tell he is lost. At lest respect the office and show the man a little dignity. I don’t agree with his policy or the democrats, but I would have been speaking with him if no one else would,’ they tweeted.
‘I guess we know who’s really running the White House and it ain’t Joe!’ another joked.
Earlier this month, Biden suffered another brain cramp when he mistakenly stated that First Lady Jill Biden was Obama’s vice president – a job he himself held for eight years – in yet another blunder during a ceremony to commission Navy’s newest nuclear submarine.
Republicans have cited Biden’s cognitive decline as the main reason for the current administration’s backtracking over the president’s other recent verbal blunders: first telling US troops in Warsaw, Poland, that they were about to go to Ukraine, before suggesting that the US might engage in using chemical weapons on Russia.
Biden’s off-script gaffes about Putin’s removal and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have prompted critics to suggest Americans need to ‘invoke the 25th amendment’ to remove the commander in chief from office.
The 25th Amendment, which outlines presidential succession, gives the vice president and Cabinet power to remove the commander in chief from office via a majority vote in the event it’s determined he or she is no longer fit for office. It has never been invoked in US history.
On March 28, Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul took issue with Biden’s use of cue cards to answer reporters’ questions regarding his off-the-cuff remarks about Putin.
Paul questioned Biden’s acuity, saying the aging president’s remarks were a threat to national security.
‘A lot of times when you’re around somebody who’s in cognitive decline, you find yourself trying to help them with a sentence, trying to help them complete it – but we shouldn’t have to do that for the commander-in-chief,’ he told Fox News.
‘And, it is actually a national security risk because he’s sending signals that no one in their right mind would want to send to Russia at this point.
‘We aren’t trying to replace Putin in Russia. We aren’t trying to have regime change.
‘We’re not sending troops into Ukraine, and we’re not going to respond in kind with chemical weapons.’
Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of Biden’s most vocal critics, said that the US should look from within for regime change instead of calling for other countries to remove their leaders from power.
‘The most needed regime change right now is the one in the United States for ruining our country,’ she tweeted last week.
Several polls show Biden’s approval at a dismal 39 percent and an average from Real Clear Politics has the president averaging a 53.7 percent disapproval rating.
Source: Daily Mail
