President Joe Biden‘s staff had to alter the official transcript of his State of the Union speech following a high-profile gaffe, repeating a pattern that’s occurring with some frequency in 2024.
In one of the speech’s defining and most bizarre moments, Biden held up a button given to him by firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA). The sticker read “Say Her Name, Laken Riley,” in reference to a Georgia college student who was allegedly murdered by an illegal immigrant.
Greene verbally challenged Biden before the speech to mention Riley and shouted “Say her name!” again when he began speaking about immigration.
The president took up the challenge but appeared to say “Lincoln” Riley, the name of a college football coach, instead of Laken.
“An innocent young woman who was killed,” Biden continued, “by an illegal. That’s right. But how many thousands of people are being killed by legals?”
When the transcript was released the next day, it twice crossed out the name “Lanken” to replace it with Laken.
While the blunder could play into Republican criticisms about Biden’s age and mental acuity, his use of the term “illegal” to describe the murder suspect upset progressive Democrats. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), for example, tweeted, “No human being is illegal.”
That part of Biden’s remarks was not altered in the transcript.
But Biden administration aides have made other corrections to his words in recent weeks. For example, on March 1, Biden met with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in the Oval Office and mentioned a new airdrop program for Gaza.
Instead of correctly naming the embattled enclave, Biden twice called it Ukraine.
“In the coming days, we’re going to join with our friends in Jordan and others in providing airdrops of — of additional food and supplies into Ukraine [Gaza] and seek to continue to open up other avenues into Ukraine [Gaza], including the possibility of a marine corridor to deliver large amounts of humanitarian assistance,” reads the White House transcript.
Concerns about Biden’s memory dominated headlines on Feb. 8, when special counsel Robert Hur’s report on the president’s handling of classified documents described him as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
In a hastily arranged press conference that night, Biden defended himself from accusations of memory loss but committed another blunder by confusing the presidents of Mexico and Egypt. That, too, was corrected in the transcript.
“I think that — as you know, initially, the President of Mexico [Egypt], El-Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in,” the transcript reads. “I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.”
And on Feb. 4, just four days prior, Biden confused French President Emmanuel Macron with his long-deceased predecessor Francois Mitterrand.
“And Mitterrand [Macron], from Germany — I mean, from France looked at me and said — said, ‘You know, what — why — how long you back for?’” reads the transcript.
Interestingly, Biden made a similar mix-up during the same week, twice confusing former German Chancellor Angela Merkel with her predecessor Helmut Kohl, which was not corrected in transcripts.
The Washington Examiner has contacted with White House with questions about the transcription process.
Despite the mispronunciation during last night’s State of the Union address and another slip in which Biden added Moscow to a list of cities with affordable prescriptions, Democrats appeared pleased with the speech and told Biden it would quiet questions about his age.
“Nobody’s going to talk about cognitively impaired now,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) said as Biden was leaving the Capitol.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Biden replied with a joke.
“I kind of wish sometimes I was cognitively impaired,” he said.
