It’s a curious scene: G7 leaders attend a parachute air show at their summit in Italy. They look at the sky and US President Joe Biden With his characteristic aviator sunglasses, he contemplates the spectacle with his mouth open.
According to the criteria of
When they land on the ground, Biden walks toward the paratroopers slowly, raises his thumbs up in a gesture of approval and the host of the summit, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, touches him on the arm to return to the rest of the group to listen to the explanations of a member of the Italian army.
Biden, 81 years old and the oldest president in US history, stands there with his arms hanging and listening intently.. An everyday moment for those who regularly follow it, but in the G7, where each gesture is analyzed in detail, it becomes a topic of conversation.
The main reason is that the video that goes viral is manipulated. A few hours after the moment, The Republican Party posted a video on its X account in which the shot is cropped, so it seems that Biden is separating from the group because he is disoriented and that, when he raises his thumb, he does so in a vacuum.
Thousands of people immediately saw the video and the conservative newspaper The New York Post began to replicate it in X with this message: “President Biden seems to wander at the G7 summit in Italy with officials who need to bring him back to focus.”
Millions of people around the world have woken up to headlines of Joe Biden’s evident cognitive decline
The controversy grew, and The New York Post placed screenshots of the doctored video on its Friday print edition with the big headline in capital letters “MEANDER IN CHIEF” and accused the president of embarrassing the United States with his “confusing wanderings.”
The campaign of Republican Donald Trump (2017-2021), who will face Biden again in the November elections, He took advantage of the moment to portray the Democratic leader as a senile old man on the verge of collapse, unable to say a coherent sentence, much less lead the country.
“From Italy to the United Kingdom to New York, millions of people around the world have woken up to headlines of Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline seen at the G7 summit,” said campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. from Trump, in a statement.
Right away, The White House responded with a barrage of X messages criticizing conservative media for playing a video with “artificially narrow framing,” in the words of Andrew Bates, one of the government spokespersons.
White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt also warned in another message on X: “Be wary of cheap fakes… and all the bad faith actors who spread them.”
Shortly after, Platform clarifying that Biden “had not become disoriented.”
The age of President Joe Biden, a central point of the presidential campaign in the United States
The president’s age has become one of the most delicate issues of his re-election campaign. A Marquette University poll shows that 79% of Americans think the phrase “too old” describes Biden “very well or fairly well,” compared to 54% who think the same of Trump, who just turned 78 yesterday. .
It is undeniable that the image projected by Biden differs from that of Trump. He walks stiffly because he has arthritis, moves slowly, sometimes trips up stairs and, in most of his speeches, makes mistakes, doesn’t finish sentences or mixes up the names of world leaders.
For example, in February of this year, he confused Emmanuel Macron, the current French president, with François Mitterrand, who led France between 1981 and 1995 and died in 1996.
The stuttering that Biden suffered as a child has reappeared over the years. However, that condition does not explain mistakes like the one that occurred in September 2022, when during an event at the White House she asked if Republican Congresswoman Jackie Walorski, who died more than a month ago, was in the audience.
These oversights will be exposed to even greater scrutiny as the campaign progresses, in which misinformation and video manipulation – also with artificial intelligence – could be determining factors.
The next litmus test for Biden will be the debate he will star in with Trump on the 27th of this month. the first of the electoral season in which voters will be able to buy the two candidates to lead the country.
This Saturday, in fact, the campaigns of the US president and Trump accepted the rules of the CNN format for face-to-face.
The 90-minute debate will include two commercial breaks, as CNN detailed this Saturday, and campaign staff will not be able to interact with their candidate during that time.
Both candidates also agreed to appear on identical podiums, and their positions on these will be determined by flipping a coin.
Among the parameters accepted by the Biden and Trump campaigns, it is established that the microphones will be closed throughout the debate except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak.
Contestants will also not be allowed on stage accessories or pre-written notes, although they will receive a pen, a notebook and a bottle of water.
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