Biden's Gaffe-Filled Speech Sparks Criticism

President Joe Biden delivered another speech Tuesday in which his gaffes overshadowed his message.

Campaigning in Florida to promote the successes of his administration's Inflation Reduction Act and potential Republican threats to repeal popular programs like Social Security, the 79-year-old Democrat made numerous questionable claims and missteps that quickly picked up steam on the internet and drowned out his closing arguments in the often-contentious state.

Among the errors: misstating his son's cause and place of death, mistakenly referring to Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as "Senator," and a claim that he had spoken with the people who invented insulin that was quickly contested by conservative commentators.

Others called him out for using similar word salad often deployed by his predecessor, Donald Trump, in explaining inflation, which he falsely claimed was among the "lowest in the world." (World Economic Forum data show that is not even close to being the case.)

"That's what I call inflation," he said. "The end of the month. What you have left. You have no money. That's inflation. What's, what do you, the things you need. Are they going up? They are. They are."

Explaining the cause of inflation, he pointed to the "war in Iraq" before correcting himself to Ukraine, saying shortly after he thought of Iraq "because that's where my son died."

While his son, Beau, served in Iraq, he died of brain cancer six years after his deployment ended. (The president noted this shortly afterward, in a line discussing the high cost of the drugs needed to treat his condition.)

A more minor gaffe came early in the speech when he referred to the recent hurricane that wreaked havoc across Florida, Hurricane Ian, as "Hurricane Ivan," the 2004 storm that caused significant damage in the Caribbean and upon making landfall in Alabama.

One contested claim, however, was plausible. Discussing legislation he'd worked on to cap the co-pay cost of insulin at $35 in his federal relief package, Biden noted that its inventors—James Collip and Charles Best—initially sold the patent to the University of Toronto for $1 because they wanted everyone to be able to access it.

The catch, however, was that Collip died in 1948 and Best in 1978, five years after Biden was elected to the U.S. Senate.

The speech came one day after a viral video in which Biden said during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania that the U.S. has "54 states" instead of 50.