The White House issued 10 corrections for President Joe Biden’s Sunday speech at a campaign event in Detroit with the NAACP.
Biden had falsely told voters at the NAACP dinner that he was vice president during the COVID-19 pandemic. His term as vice president ended in January 2017, three years before the start of the pandemic.
"When I was vice president, things were kind of bad during the pandemic, and what happened was, Barack said to me, ‘Go to Detroit! Help fix it,’" Biden said. The White House transcript of the speech crossed out "pandemic" and replaced it with "recession."
The White House’s other revisions show that Biden said "inspiresing" instead of "inspiring," "irrectionists" instead of "insurrectionists," and "organization" instead of "award" before referring to the NAACP as "NAAC."
The Democrat also made two grammatical mistakes and misquoted presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump as well as a statistic about the Affordable Care Act.
Biden’s latest gaffes came as a series of polls have indicated his reelection bid is in dire straits. Trump is leading the incumbent by 6 percentage points nationally, according to a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released on Monday.
A New York Times poll last week showed Trump ahead of Biden in five of six anticipated swing states in the 2024 presidential election, and the Pew Research Center found last month that Biden was losing support even among black voters, a demographic that has historically been a solid voting bloc for the Democratic Party.