Joe Biden appeared to mix up Emmanuel Macron with Francois Mitterrand, the former French president who died in 1996, in the latest public-speaking gaffe by the US president.

Speaking to hospitality workers in Las Vegas ahead of Tuesday’s Nevada primary, Mr Biden told an anecdote about a G7 summit he attended in June 2021.

The 81-year-old president recounted how he told the meeting in Cornwall that “America is back”, which prompted a response from “Mitterrand from Germany”, before correcting it to “from France”.

“Mitterrand from Germany — I mean, from France — looked at me and said, ‘You know, what ... why … how long you back for?” said Mr Biden.

He answered by broadening the conversation to the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington DC. 

“And I looked at him and … the Chancellor of Germany said: ‘What would you say, Mr President, if you picked up the paper tomorrow in the London Times, and the London Times said, ‘a thousand people break through the House of Commons, break down the doors, two bobbies are killed in order to stop the election of the Prime Minister’. What would you say?’”

The White House later published the remarks with the name “Mitterrand” crossed out and replaced with “Macron”.

Mitterrand became French president in 1981 and remained in office until 1995. He died a year later, aged 79. Mr Macron was elected in 2017, aged 39, becoming France’s youngest head of state since Napoleon.

In contrast, Mr Biden is the oldest sitting US president who, if re-elected in November, would be 86 by the end of his second term.

Biden the ‘gaffe machine’ 

It is the latest high-profile speaking mistake by Mr Biden who has previously jokingly referred to himself as a “gaffe machine”.

Last June, he called Chinese leader Xi Jinping a “dictator” at a fundraiser in California, prompting an angry response from Beijing and further straining diplomatic relations between the countries.

The same month Mr Biden confused the war in Ukraine for the Iraq War, which ended in 2011. He declared that Russia’s Vladimir Putin was “clearly losing the war in Iraq”.

His chief political opponent, Donald Trump, 77, scored a similar own-goal recently by mistaking presidential candidate Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi, the former House of Representatives speaker, while discussing the Jan 6 attack.

Mr Biden later mocked Mr Trump for the gaffe, saying: “I don’t agree with Nikki Haley on everything, but we agree on this much: She is not Nancy Pelosi.”