President Joe Biden was mocked online Wednesday after an errant comment about Russian leader Vladimir Putin‘s “war in Iraq”—a country whose capital sits approximately 1,200 miles away from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Numerous figures on the right—including the Republican National Committee’s press arm—mocked the mistake on social media. One prominent Trump supporter said in a Twitter post viewed more than 74,000 times that Biden had “lost his mind.”
Speaking with reporters about a recently aborted uprising against the Russian military establishment and its handling of the war, Biden said he believed the increasingly visible fissures in Russia’s high ranks were clear signs Putin was losing his grip on power.
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“It’s hard to tell, but [Putin is] clearly losing the war in Iraq, and he’s losing the war at home,” he told reporters.
Q: “To what extent has Vladimir Putin been weakened by recent events?”
President Biden: “It’s hard to tell but he is clearly losing the war in Iraq, he’s losing the war at home and he has become a bit of a pariah around the world.” pic.twitter.com/PZhYhdGDij
— CSPAN (@cspan) June 28, 2023
Biden also mistakenly referred to Ukraine as Iraq during a Tuesday night fundraiser, Bloomberg‘s Nancy Cook reported, making the gaffe alongside a slip where he referred to the prime minister of India as the leader of China.
Both last night at a fundraiser + then again this morning at the White House, President Biden referred to Ukraine as “Iraq” and said “my new best friend the prime minister of China” before correcting himself to say the Prime Minister of India.
— Nancy Cook (@nancook) June 28, 2023
For Biden, who has been prone to misspeak throughout his presidency, the gaffe pales in comparison to more severe ones he has made during his tenure. They include moments in which he offered salutations to a deceased congresswoman and comments about Russia’s potential deployment of nuclear weapons that were later downplayed by the White House press office.
But for a man whom conservative network Fox News once claimed to average at least one gaffe daily, the comment only helped to reinforce questions from opponents and the press about the 80-year-old’s mental acuity as he seeks four more years as commander-in-chief.
The 2003 American-driven invasion of Iraq, which Biden voted for, was met with skepticism by Putin at the time. And while Russia has been involved militarily in the Middle East, it has not directly dealt with Iraq since the 1980s, when it was a key ally of the country in its ongoing war with Iran.
Some, like GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, have used Biden’s slip-ups as central to calls for cognitive fitness tests for candidates for president, while poll numbers have shown increasing public concern over Biden’s recent performance.
In one recent NBC poll held between June 16-20, 68 percent of 1,000 registered U.S. voters expressed concern that Biden does not have the necessary mental and physical health to be president, including 55 percent who said they have “major” concerns: approximately double the percentage of voters who had similar feelings at the start of his term.
Similar numbers had previously been reported in an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll of 1,286 U.S. adults taken in May. It found that 43% of the those surveyed saw questions about Biden’s mental fitness not as the result of GOP campaign tricks, but of genuine concern.
Earlier this week, NBC host Chuck Todd confronted Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar—a former Democratic candidate for president—with the recent numbers, asking whether she had any concerns about the trend.
“No, I don’t,” the senator responded. “Our party is united around him. Why? Because we work in a results-oriented business and he has gotten results.”
Newsweek has reached out to the White House Press Office via email for comment.