WASHINGTON – President Biden said Monday that he was at the World Trade Center site in New York City a day after the 9/11 attacks, even though his own autobiography places him in DC.
The 80-year-old president also claimed to have seen the fireball caused by the plane that crashed into the Pentagon in northern Virginia from Washington’s Union Station, when his own book says he simply saw “a brown haze of smoke.”
“Ground Zero in New York. I remember being there the next day and looking at the 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 attacks.
“It seemed so devastating the way you could, from where you could stand. Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the Pentagon in Virginia. I spent many 9/11 attacks in those hollow grounds to witness and remember those we lost,” he continued.
Moments later, the president stated that he saw the immediate consequences of the impact of American Airlines Flight 77 against the Pentagon.
“The column of fire that shot into the sky at the Pentagon [sic] — I remember seeing when I got off the Amtrak train on the 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, “Promises to Keep,” gives a different account of his actions on Sept. 11 and the day after.
Biden wrote that he arrived in Washington on the morning of September 11, 2001, after American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon and “could see a brown haze of smoke floating in the otherwise crystal-clear sky beyond the dome of the Capitol.”
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 day after the attacks while search and rescue work was underway, despite describing Biden speaking to students at the University of Delaware on September 19, 2001 and visiting a mosque in Newark. , New Jersey, two days after that.
A Gannett News Wire report from September 12, 2001 began: “Delaware Sen. Joe Biden spent Wednesday exactly where he wanted: in the U.S. Senate.” C-SPAN footage shows Biden giving a speech.
Two days later, then-President George W. Bush visited the former site of the Twin Towers, where he spoke to workers through a megaphone and famously said: “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked them down These buildings will soon listen to us all.”
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 attack.
Biden offers conflicting narratives about how he witnessed the tragic moment.EPA
He also claimed to have seen the immediate consequences of the impact of American Airlines Flight 77 against the Pentagon.
Biden has a decades-long habit of embellishing facts, but his frequent biographical misstatements come as polls show most voters feel he is too old to seek a second term in next year’s election.
The president often goes overboard when trying to establish a personal connection with his audience.
Last month, Biden claimed, while speaking about the devastation of the Hawaii wildfires, that his Delaware home “almost collapsed” due to a small kitchen fire nearly two decades ago, after telling survivors in a previous event on Maui that firefighters “ran into the flames” to rescue first lady Jill. Biden.
At a fire prevention summit in October last year, he stated that “we almost lost a couple of firefighters” during the fire, prompting the local fire department to issue a statement calling the fire “insignificant.”
Biden told students at historically black colleges in Atlanta last year that he was arrested multiple times while protesting for civil rights, a claim for which there is no evidence.
In 2021, Biden told Jewish leaders that he remembered “spending time” and “going to” the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 after the worst anti-Semitic attack in US history, in which 11 people were killed. The synagogue said she never visited her, and the White House later said she was considering a 2019 phone call to the synagogue’s rabbi.
Later that month, Biden told an Idaho audience that his “first job offer” came from local lumber and wood products company Boise Cascade. Company officials said it was news to them.
Biden said at the Naval Academy graduation ceremony 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- Of the.). A search of Boggs’ files failed to find evidence of the appointment.
The latest misremembering comes as polls show Biden’s perceived mental illness 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% said the same of Donald Trump, 77, the former and current president. favorite for the Republican party. nomination.
A Wall Street Journal poll published last week found that 73% of respondents believed Biden was too old, while 47% said the same about Trump.
The book does not describe any trips to Ground Zero, much less the day after the attacks while search and rescue efforts were underway.C-SPAN
In addition to public scrutiny of his mental acuity, Biden also has a long history of gaffes and false biographical claims.
His first presidential campaign infamously ended in 1987 due to a speech and law school paper plagiarism scandal.
Biden appropriated British politician Neil Kinnock’s family history, and Biden changed geographic details to claim in his speeches that “my ancestors… worked in the coal mines of northeastern Pennsylvania and would come back after 12 hours and play tag.” football for four hours.”
Unlike Kinnock’s Welsh ancestors, Biden’s ancestors did not mine coal.
Biden also falsely claimed that he “graduated with three college degrees,” was named “the top student in the political science department,” “went to law school on a full academic scholarship; the only one in my class who had a full academic scholarship.” And “she ended up in the top half” of his class.
None of those statements were true.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn