President Biden once again made a false claim about his son Beau’s death while speaking to an audience at a community college in North Carolina on Friday.
The comment about Beau came as the president was explaining he hadn't planned on running for president.
You know, as I said just a few years ago, we were really in trouble. But the problems we’re facing today started, as I said, a lot earlier than that.
You know, the bottom line is this: I ran for President — I ran for President for a basic reason. And I hadn’t planned on running again for President. I had run when I was Vice President, and then Barack and I spent eight years together. And then the new administration came in. And in the meantime, things changed in our life and our family. I lost my son. We lost our son in Iraq. Anyway.
I hadn’t planned on running. But one of the things that didn’t make — what I really decided was: We stopped paying attention to the neighborhoods that I came from. You know, I come from a neighborhood like maybe a lot of you, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which closed down because of the mines closed down. And then we moved to a place called Claymont, Delaware, where they had 4,500 steelworkers working in — in the factories. That shut down completely.
All across the country, we were seeing things change. (White House)
Biden, 80, has made this false statement on a number of occasions.
While Beau returned to the U.S. in 2009, he died in 2015 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, after a battle with glioblastoma.
Just recently, Biden spoke of Beau to U.S. troops, saying, “we lost him in Iraq.”
These statements follow a similar one from October of 2022 when he was declaring the Camp Hale Continental Divide a national monument: “I say this as a father of a man who won the Bronze Star, the conspicuous service medal, and lost his life in Iraq. Imagine the courage, the daring, and the genuine sacrifice — genuine sacrifice they all made."
In November of 2022 he called Iraq the place “where my son died.”
Biden has previously speculated about the role “burn pits” may have played in Beau’s brain cancer.
The comment comes as a majority of Americans have expressed concern about Biden's mental acuity, according an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member