While President Joe Biden is known for his blunders and colorful turns of phrase, his staffers increasingly are correcting his words after the fact via strikethroughs in the White House transcript.
The written record of a May 19 campaign speech in Detroit includes no less than nine corrections, a few of which created mini-news cycles of their own in real time.
One was when Biden recalled being vice president during the pandemic, saying “Barack,” meaning former President Barack Obama, told him to go to Detroit and “help fix it.” But Biden was running for president during the pandemic, and Obama had been out of office for three years.
The transcript replaced the word “pandemic” with “recession.”
In a separate spot, Biden spoke about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, describing the people who stormed Capitol Hill as “erectionists.”
The White House press team wrote the blunder as “irrectionists” and corrected it to “insurrectionists.”
Correcting the record has been a frequent habit of Biden’s staffers for years, one that the president’s critics say reflects his lack of fitness for the office.
“I’ve heard of cleaning up a president’s mistakes, but this is ridiculous,” presidential historian and Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley said. “It should be called the White House Mess team.”
An analysis from the Daily Caller conducted in late April found that Biden’s team had corrected his remarks at least 148 times since the beginning of this year, a figure that is now well north of 150. The outlet reported that former President Donald Trump‘s press team sometimes corrected his transcripts, but not with the regularity or intensity of Biden’s.
Read more at Washingtonexaminer.com
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