Tipsheet

Biden’s Bad Habit Rears Its Head During D-Day Address

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  June 07, 2024 6:30 PM

President Joe Biden delivered remarks at Pointe Du Hoc to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. US Army Rangers scaled its cliffs to take out the reported gun batteries that could potentially shell American forces storming nearby Utah Beach. No such heavy artillery pieces were present at the time of the assault. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech at the 40th anniversary of the assault. It is fitting that Biden be there for the 80th, but it seems he plagiarized portions of Reagan’s speech. You be the judge. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton clipped the comparison: 

There are other issues to attack Biden. Then again, it’s quite the throwback to the 1988 election season, where Biden got in trouble during his first presidential bid, plagiarizing a speech from then-UK Labour Leader Neil Kinnock. The then-young Delaware liberal declared his candidacy on June 9, 1987—and it ended in three months due to this scandal. It led to a series of lies being exposed about Biden, a habit the now 80-year-old has yet to break (via Newsweek): 

A few days before they began, video surfaced that spliced together footage of U.K. Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock giving a speech and Biden clearly quoting Kinnock at the Iowa State Fair without attribution. More examples of misattribution came to light, and the plagiarism scandal became more memorable than his leadership during the Bork confirmation hearing. His mouth — or rather, what he failed to say — got him in trouble again. 

Here’s how TIME described why the fallout was so intense: 

[T]he Biden brouhaha illustrates the six deadly requirements for a crippling political scandal. 

1) A Pre-Existing Subtext. “The basic rap against Biden,” explains Democratic Pollster Geoff Garin, “is that he’s a candidate of style, not substance.”

2) An Awkward Revelation. The Kinnock kleptomania was particularly damaging to Biden since it underscored the prior concerns that he was a shallow vessel for other people’s ideas.

3) A Maladroit Response. Top Aide Tom Donilon claimed that Biden failed to credit Kinnock because “he didn’t know what he was saying. He was on autopilot.” 

4) The Press Piles On. Once textual fidelity became an issue, reporters found earlier cases in which Biden had failed to give proper citation to Humphrey and Robert Kennedy. By themselves these transgressions would not have been worth noting. 

5) The Discovery of Youthful Folly. During his first months at Syracuse University Law School, in 1965, Biden failed a course because he wrote a paper that used five pages from a published law-review article without quotation marks or a proper footnote. Since Biden was allowed to make up the course, the revelation was front-page news only because it kept the copycat contretemps alive. 

6) An Overwrought Press Conference. With a rambling and disjointed opening statement, Biden failed to reap the benefits of public confession, even though he called himself “stupid” and his actions “a mistake.” Part of the problem is that he contradicted himself by also insisting that it was “ludicrous” to attribute every political idea. 

The “final blow” for the campaign came when Newsweek unearthed C-SPAN footage of Biden rattling off his academic accomplishments, including saying that he graduated in the top half of his law school, when in fact, he ranked 76th out of 85. 

Biden announced he was dropping out of the race on Sept. 24, 1987. (To make things even, Biden later jokingly gave Kinnock some of his speeches to use “with or without attribution” during a January 1988 trip to Europe.)

And this doesn’t include the “corn pop” myth or being arrested during a civil rights demonstration. In the past, he was more or less tolerated for this sort of fabulism because it was often dismissed with a ‘that’s just Joe’ attitude—someone who has a chronic condition of diarrhea of the mouth. It’s a different story now this man is in the White House, showing daily signs of mental decline and the lack of presidential timber. You could argue cynically that lying is part of a politician’s job description. That may be the case since voters are often more outraged over the cover-up of a scandal rather than the scandal itself. 

Did Biden return to his 1987 self at Pointe Du Hoc? It wouldn’t shock me. Right now, there are more damning trip-ups that can be weaponized to attack the president.