I know how he feels. I wish I couldn’t remember that Old Joe Biden has been president at all. But the old man apparently thinks that he has been playing the role of president for longer than he actually has: on Thursday, he boasted that “the unemployment rate is 3.6 percent, down from 6.4 percent when I took office nineteen months ago.”

He has actually only been in office for fifteen months, although you’d think his administration would have needed fifteen years, or five hundred, to do all the damage it has done.

There are several aspects of this that make it a larger problem than just a little verbal slip. First is the fact that if we didn’t have the video, we might never have known that Biden made this particular gaffe at all.

The WhiteHouse.gov transcript has this: “The unemployment rate is 3.6 percent, down from 6.4 percent when I took office.” There is not a hint that anything has been altered.

Just three weeks ago, on April 3, I predicted this: “We’re only a few steps away from WhiteHouse.gov erasing the real remarks that Biden made, instead of just crossing them out and correcting them, and replacing them with an entirely fictional version of what he said. Inconceivable? Not at all.”

What WhiteHouse.gov has posted is not entirely fictional, but it gives the reader no impression whatsoever that Biden misspoke yet again, and given all the justifiable concern about the putative president’s mental deterioration, that’s as actively misleading as if WhiteHouse.gov had posted the Gettysburg Address as a new statement from Old Joe.

Some might insist that this is simply a matter of Joe misreading the teleprompter. That could be, but back in January 2022, when Biden said that “there is a lot of reason to be hopeful in 2020,” that was harder to blame on the teleprompter. 

This was the same Biden who asked on March 4: “How did we get to the place where, you know, Putin just decides he’s gonna invade Russia? Something like this hasn’t happened since World War II.” Biden also declared in his State of the Union address that “Putin may encircle Kyiv with tanks, but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people.” 

On the same day he extended his tenure as president by four months, he more famously confused the mask mandate with Title 42, the Trump-era law that at least partially staunches the flow of migrants across the Southern border. He has mistaken his wife for the vice president and the vice president for his wife.