Blundering Biden Now More of a Dem Liability than Cringy Kamala

Throughout Joe Biden’s presidency, his greatest insurance policy has been his choice of Kamala Harris as his vice president. Given Kamala’s proneness to embarrassing gaffes, her abysmal public speaking abilities, and her infamous witch-like cackle, she has been rightly considered a much greater political liability than Joe Biden, who, despite his own numerous gaffes, is generally perceived as more likable.

But with some of his own recent blunders, Biden has blown this insurance policy and achieved the previously unthinkable: surpassing Kamala in the cringe quotient and endangering his future as the Democrat Party’s standard-bearer.

To most voters, Kamala’s head-scratching behavior on the campaign trail is far from a secret. Since she was sworn in as vice president nearly three years ago, she has had no shortage of cringeworthy moments and uncomfortable episodes.

In one such moment last year, Kamala spent several moments gushing about her supposed love for Venn diagrams. “I love Venn diagrams,” she said in a set of October remarks before belting out one of her signature cackles. “I really do. I love Venn diagrams. There’s just something about those three circles and the analysis about where there is the intersection. Right?”

Like her over-the-top praise of Venn diagrams, Kamala has also spoken in an unnecessarily elevated tone about her admiration of school buses. “So, here’s the thing. Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus? Right? Can you raise your hand if you love a yellow school bus? Right? Just—there’s something about—and some of us, many of us went to school on the yellow school bus, right?” she said. This moment recalls her singing the children’s song “Wheels on the Bus” during her failed presidential campaign in 2020.

And earlier this year, Kamala again raised eyebrows when she insisted at an event in Baltimore that “more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water” when the U.S. strives to “reduce population”—likely mistakenly reading “population” instead of “pollution.”

Of course, this is just the beginning of Harris’s streak of gaffes. As a result, up until recently, Biden was able to rest assured that Kamala’s often humiliating public persona would be enough to guarantee that he would remain at the top of the ticket in 2024, given that his natural successor would be Harris. It was also helpful to Biden that Harris is even more unpopular than he is.

But now, that logic is being increasingly called into question. Over the past several weeks alone, Biden has accelerated his record of gaffes and cringeworthy campaign moments to unimaginable new heights.

On the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, for instance, Biden falsely claimed that he was “standing” at “Ground Zero in New York” the “next day,” “looking through the gates of hell”—even though he was in Washington, D.C. for a Senate session. To make matters worse, he spent this year’s anniversary at an Alaska air base—making Biden the first president since the attacks not to visit an attack site on the anniversary.

Moreover, at a press conference in Vietnam earlier this month, Biden embarrassingly fielded several scripted questions and later abruptly stated, “I tell you what, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to bed”—at which point his press secretary ended the press conference and Biden shuffled off the stage, inaudibly continuing to answer questions from the press pool. Biden also bizarrely made a joking reference to “Good Morning Vietnam,” a film about the horrors of the Vietnam War (incorrectly referring to it as a song instead of a movie, no less).

Among Biden’s other gaffes include the time he repeated aloud instructions loaded into his teleprompter. “It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast a ballot is consistently higher than the percentage of the men who do so—end of quote. Repeat the line,” Biden said in a July 2022 speech, clearly not recognizing the instructions were simply meant to serve as unread cues. Many—including Elon Musk—were quick to compare the Biden gaffe to a scene in the classic 2004 comedy Anchorman, in which the film’s protagonist reads an obvious error that was loaded into a teleprompter.

In addition to his outright lies about his visit to Ground Zero the day of the September 11 attacks, Biden has also falsely claimed he watched a bridge collapse in Pittsburgh last year, and that his grandfather passed away “two weeks before” he was born, even though he died more than a year before Biden’s birth. Biden has also repeatedly claimed that he “got arrested” protesting for civil rights. “I did not walk in the shoes of generations of students who walked these grounds,” Biden said in an early 2022 speech in Atlanta. “But I walked other grounds. Because I’m so damn old, I was there as well. You think I’m kidding, man. It seems like yesterday the first time I got arrested. Anyway.”

Not only are these claims obviously false, but they have also been discredited by the same mainstream media operatives who generally rush to Biden’s defense. At a White House press conference in mid-September, a reporter asked, “What is going on with the president? Is he just believing things that didn’t happen did happen? Or is he just randomly making stuff up?”

Whether Joe Biden is a serial liar, mentally impaired, or both, the media’s growing realization that Biden is a walking gaffe machine even more egregious than Kamala does not bode well for his political future—particularly as the Democrat Party continues to actively seek alternatives to Biden in 2024.

Regardless of whose name ultimately makes it onto the 2024 ballot, however, one thing remains certain: the reality that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris currently hold the two highest offices in the land is deeply disconcerting.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.