World leaders gathered at the historic NATO summit to reinforce one of the international community’s strongest alliances amid a time of global unrest. On the last night, they found themselves excusing President Joe Biden for mistakenly calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “President Putin.”
Biden caught himself immediately Thursday night. “And now I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he does determination, President Putin … President Putin? We’re going to beat President Putin. President Zelenskyy,” Biden said, self-correcting in real time.
That wasn’t enough to prevent the flub, which once could have been chalked up to yet another Bidenism, from becoming the flub heard around the world.
Major heads of state, who had prescheduled press conferences immediately after, were asked the same question: Can our country really trust Biden after such a monumental mistake on the world stage?
“Look, on President Biden, I can’t really say much more than I’ve said already,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told reporters. “This was a successful council. He led it. He deserves credit for the outcome.”
Four reporters in a row asked Starmer about the slip.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo excused the gaffe: “Everyone makes mistakes,” he said.
As did France’s president, Emmanuel Macron: “We all make mistakes. It’s happened to me; it’ll probably happen to me again tomorrow,” he said, according to a reporter from Semafor.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz simply said, “Lapses can happen.”
Biden’s reelection campaign against former President Donald Trump has dominated the summit. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg addressed what NATO would do under a possible Trump presidency Wednesday, expressing confidence that the United States would remain central to the alliance. But as Democrats hand-wring over Biden’s electability and personal fitness for office, foreign leaders too have reportedly started to privately question Biden’s political future — a question punctuated by having to answer for Biden misspeaking on a world stage.
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John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.