Biden Speaking Errors Doubled In Last Year, Analysis Of Official Transcript Corrections Finds

The White House’s own official transcripts suggest that President Joe Biden’s speaking errors have grown steadily worse, with his rate of missteps doubling in the 12 months leading up to his disastrous debate performance in June.

White House staff tasked with preparing transcripts of his “speeches and remarks” cross out Biden’s erroneous words — or insert the words he should have said using brackets. They had to do that a staggering 51 times in May 2024. The rate of errors per words spoken was one of the worst of his presidency, and he was whisked out of the public eye for much of June, speaking only half the number of words in official remarks that he normally does — until, of course, his cognitive difficulties captured the world’s attention at the June 27 debate.

In the animated graphic below, the red bars represent the rate of his speaking errors (per 10,000 words spoken) in the 12 months leading up to that, with the trend increasing steadily upward. As the graphic cycles through each month, it displays the modified language in official transcripts, with some of the most egregious quotes highlighted in larger text at the bottom.

In June 2023, the White House corrected 33 errors, amounting to an error rate of 3.2 per 10,000 words. The 51 errors in May led to a rate of 7.2 for that month, when he spoke 70,000 words.

The corrections have continued. On Friday, in Madison, Wisconsin, Biden addressed the concerns about his age by saying: “They’re trying to push me out of this race. Well, let me say this as clearly as I can: I’m staying in the race. I’ll beat Donald Trump.  I will beat him again in 2020.”

Here’s how the White House’s transcript looks:

The “speeches and remarks” transcripts capture how he spoke at nearly 400 official events, about one per day. They do not include every utterance, but the transcripts are prepared in a standard way that makes it possible to objectively compare them over time.

The officially-designated errors suggest that the man overseeing a multi-trillion dollar budget has difficulty communicating numbers. He routinely says numbers that are off by multiple orders of magnitude, when an awareness of basic facts such as the size of the federal budget or the population of the country would seemingly alert the speaker that they could not be right. He also repeatedly fails to distinguish the debt from the deficit, which are different terms with different meanings.

• “we cut the debt [deficit] by $1.7 trillion”
• “on January the 8th [6th]”
• “invest $200 million [billion]”
• “440 [thousand] new jobs”,
• “another $2 thousand [$2 trillion] tax cut”
• “these 100 [1,000] billionaires”
• “800,000 in prem- — $8,000 [$800]”

The mistakes together paint a picture of a man who blindly reads off of a teleprompter and is willing to say the words he believes are being fed to him even if they make no sense, such as that America invented something called “cheeps”, or that his administration did the opposite of what it wanted to do.

They also suggest that Biden has a warped sense of time, with decades ago intermingling with the present. At one point he refers to Taylor Swift as Britney Spears. He sometimes does not seem to remember who is president:

•  “hand on my little son [grandson] Hunter”
• “It’s been 65 years [days] since the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust — 65 years [days]”

The man in charge of geopolitical affairs does not seem to recall facts about geography that are known to the average person, or remember the names of important allies:

• “Brian Schantz [Schatz], our senator”
• “ice hockey; 1,000 [10,000] Lakes; and the Mall of America”
• “Mitterrand [Macron], from Germany u2014 I mean, from France”
• “Secretary Julie Shu [Su]”
• “The NAAC [NAACP] spirit endures”

The Daily Wire limited its analysis to only on errors acknowledged by White House transcript preparers themselves, meaning the numbers only includes a certain type of Biden’s mistakes, generally where he made severely nonsensical remarks while attempting to read from a teleprompter and did not correct himself in the moment. Those corrections were made prominently in documents on the White House’s website, despite some reporters claiming that the White House tricked them into not knowing about Biden’s cognitive difficulties.

The transcripts show Biden has long made almost comical misstatements of the sort that the media was highly attuned to in previous years, such as when former president George Bush infamously bungled a few words:

This article is the first in a series analyzing evidence of Biden’s mental agility over time.