WASHINGTON — President Biden said Monday that he was at the World Trade Center site in New York City the day after the 9/11 attacks — even though his own autobiography places it in DC.
The 80-year-old president also claimed he saw a fireball caused by a plane that hit the Pentagon in northern Virginia from Washington’s Union Station, when his own book says he only saw a “brown haze of smoke.”
“Ground Zero in New York – I remember standing there the next day and looking at that building. And I felt like I was looking through the gates of hell,” Biden told US troops in Anchorage, Alaska, on the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attack. .
“It looks so terrible because of the way you can, from where you can stand. Shanksville, Pa., the Pentagon in Virginia — I spent a lot of 9/11 in that hollow area bearing witness and remembering those we lost,” he continued.
Moments later, the president claimed that he saw just after American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
“The plume of fire rising in the sky at the Pentagon [sic] — I remember when I got off the Amtrak train on my way to work in the United States Senate,” Biden reflected.
President Biden claims he was in New York the day after 9/11 but his biography shares a different version.AP
The president’s 2007 autobiography “Promise to Keep” gives a different account of his actions on 9/11 and the days that followed.
Biden wrote that he arrived in Washington on the morning of September 11, 2001, after American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon and “I could see a brown haze of smoke hanging in the crystal clear sky outside the Capitol dome.”
He wrote in the book, “I returned to the Capitol the next morning” – September 12, 2001.
The book does not describe any trips to Ground Zero, much less the days after the attacks as search and rescue efforts were underway — though it does describe Biden speaking to University of Delaware students on September 19, 2001, and visiting a mosque in Newark, NJ two days later. that.
A Gannett News Wire report from September 12, 2001 began: “Delaware Senator Joe Biden spent Wednesday exactly where he wanted to – in the US Senate.” C-SPAN footage shows Biden giving a speech.
Two days later, then-President George W. Bush visited the site of the former Twin Towers, where he spoke to workers from a cow and famously said: “I can hear you, the whole world hears you, and the people who tear this building down will hear us all soon.”
A White House official told The Post that Biden was considering visiting Ground Zero on Sept. 20, 2001, as part of a delegation of 38 senators nine days after the attacks.
Biden provided conflicting narratives about witnessing the tragic moment.EPA
He also claimed to have seen the moment after American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon.EPA
Biden has a decades-long habit of embellishing the facts, but his frequent biographical missteps came as polls showed a majority of voters felt he was too old to seek a second term in next year’s election.
Presidents often go overboard when trying to establish a personal relationship with their audience.
Last month, Biden claimed while discussing the devastation of wildfires in Hawaii that his home in Delaware “almost collapsed” in a small kitchen fire nearly two decades ago – after telling survivors at a previous event in Maui that firefighters were “on fire” to save women first Jill Biden.
At a fire prevention summit in October last year, he claimed “we almost lost a couple of firefighters” during the blaze – prompting the local fire department to issue a statement calling the blaze “not significant.”
Biden told students at a historically black college in Atlanta last year that he had been arrested several times during civil rights protests — a claim for which there was no evidence.
Biden in 2021 told Jewish leaders that he remembered “spending time at” and “going to” Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 after the worst anti-Semitic attack in US history, in which 11 people were killed. The synagogue said he never visited and the White House later said he was thinking about a 2019 phone call to the synagogue’s rabbi.
Later that month, Biden told an Idaho audience that his “first job offer” came from a local Boise Cascade lumber and wood products business. The company said it was news to them.
Biden said at the Naval Academy graduation in May 2022 — and again at the Air Force Academy last June — that he was appointed to the prestigious Annapolis military college by the late Sen. J. Caleb Boggs (R-Del.). A search of the Boggs archives failed to turn up evidence of the appointment.
The latest misremembering comes as polls show Biden’s perceived mental frailty is a liability in next year’s election.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll from June found that only 32% of voters believe Biden has the mental acuity needed to be president — while 54% say the same about Donald Trump, 77, the former president and front-runner for the Republican nomination.
A Wall Street Journal poll released last week found that 73% of those registered believe Biden is too old, while 47% said the same about Trump.
The book does not describe any trips to Ground Zero, especially in the days after the attack as search and rescue efforts were underway.C-SPAN
In addition to public scrutiny of his mental acuity, Biden also has a long record of errors and false biographical claims.
His first presidential campaign ended infamously in 1987 due to a scandal involving plagiarism of law school speeches and papers.
Biden appropriated the family history of British politician Neil Kinnock — with Biden switching geographic details to claim in a speech that “my great-grandfather … worked in the coal mines in Northeastern Pennsylvania and would show up after 12 hours and play football for four hours .”
Unlike Kinnock’s Welsh ancestors, Biden’s ancestors did not mine coal.
Biden also falsely claimed he “graduated with three degrees from college,” was named “outstanding student in the political science department,” “went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class on a full academic scholarship” and ” ended up at the top” of his class.
None of the allegations are true.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
