President Joe Biden delivered a joke during an event for the Memorial Day weekend that left many baffled and led to some harsh criticism and name-calling.
Along with First Lady Jill Biden, the President traveled to the Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Virginia, where he delivered a speech on the country’s efforts to slow down the spread of COVID-19 through the social distancing rules put in place and the push to have as many Americans possible vaccinated.
The Democratic leader strayed away briefly from his speech to compliment a little girl present at the event along with her parents and brothers.
The child’s mother was the one who introduced Biden to the audience. Biden raised eyebrows by saying: “I love those barrettes in your hair, man. I tell you what, look at her, she looks like she’s 19 years old, sitting there like a little lady with her legs crossed.”
Joe Biden looks at a little girl in the audience, the daughter of a veteran, and says "I love those barrettes in your hair. Man I’ll tell you what, look at her she looks like she's 19 years old sitting there like a little lady with her legs crossed." pic.twitter.com/DbH8ihG2Mj
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) May 28, 2021
This was a month of failed jokes for Joe Biden, and he delivered a speech to Coast Guard graduates last Wednesday.
He was criticized for recycling a joke made by Ronald Reagan in 1988 without giving credit to the former US President.
In his first commencement speech as President of the US, Joe Biden referred to a phrase used more than thirty years ago by Ronald Reagan, who said that one of the aides had taught him that the Coast Guard was “that hard nucleus about which the Navy forms.”
However, when Biden used a similar line last week — slipping up on his words and quoting that the Coast Guard is “the hard nucleus around the Navy forms in time of war” — nobody in the audience laughed or clapped, prompting the President to point it out.
“You are a really dull class,” he told the audience, which resulted in a ripple of laughter from the crowd.
He then jokingly asked if the sun was “getting to [them]” and told them he thought they would have clapped at such a comment about the Coast Guard.
His latter comment prompted members of the audience to offer laughs and applause as Biden continued with his speech.
Social media users were quick to draw the links between Joe Biden’s recent speech and the one delivered by Ronald Reagan during his time as President — which was also a commencement speech to the Coast Guard graduates that year.
The year before — in 1987, when Biden was 44 years old and a frontrunner to take over the US presidency from Ronald Reagan’s party, he dropped out of the race after a plagiarism scandal where he copied a speech by Neil Kinnock, a former leader of the UK’s Labour Party, who had made a very similar speech just months prior.
While some critics are focused on President Joe Biden’s failed jokes, his supporters are applauding his accomplishments. Since stepping into the White House on January 20th, Biden has signed the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill.
And his administration has worked diligently to get more than 200 million Americans vaccinated against the coronavirus. There is a steady decline in unemployment, and schools are reopening; the mask mandate has been relaxed.
Millions of people have received stimulus payments worth up to $1,400 per person. And unlike his predecessor, Donald Trump, Biden has avoided scandals and epic rants on Twitter.
