Biden’s latest gaffe has brought about a storm on Twitter after he seemed to claim that he has cancer.
The president was speaking in Somerset, Massachusetts, discussing what he intends to do about the climate when he got on the topic of his own upbringing, saying that Somerset and the former coal plant he was speaking at was “not very much unlike where I grew up in a place called Claymont, Delaware, which has more oil refineries than Houston, Texas.”
“I just lived up the road in an apartment complex when we moved to Delaware, and just up the road a little school I went to, Holy Rosary grade school, and because it was a four lane highway that was accessible, my mother drove us and rather than us be able to walk,” Biden said. “And guess what? The first frost, you know what was happening, you’d have to put on your windshield wipers to get literally the oil slick off the window.”
“That’s why I and so damn many other people I grew up [with] have cancer, and I why can’t for the longest time, Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation,” Biden continued.
Twitter jumped into a flurry of activity with many wondering if the comment was truly one of Biden’s gaffes or something more.
“Cancer? This is either the biggest bombshell in presidential history or the biggest gaffe,” RealClearPolitics founder, Tom Bevan, tweeted.
“From the people who hyperventilated over demanding Trump told people to inject themselves with bleach, they sure are trying hard to avoid, ‘I and so many people my age have cancer because of windshield wipers cleaning oil off my car,’” tweeted conservative writer Chad Felix Greene.
Washington Times columnist Tim Young said, “Maybe Joe Biden meant to say that he, himself is a cancer to America.”
Political consultant Ellen Charmichael argued that the misstep could have been more intentional than originally expected. “If Biden DOESN’T/DIDN’T have cancer, this isn’t ‘misspeaking’ or a speech impediment. It’s just the latest in a long line of fabulist talking points everyone has let him off the hook for over the years.”
However, some were quick to defend the president’s comments. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler hit back at a tweet from the RNC Research Twitter account, saying, “How dumb is this tweet? Check out Biden’s medical report. Before he became president, he’d had non-melanoma skin cancers removed. Has no one at @RNCResearch ever had this common procedure?”
“WH official tells me POTUS was referring to past removal of skin cancer in his remarks from Massachusetts,” tweeted Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich. “Biden mistakenly stated (present tense) that he has cancer.”
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