Concerns About Joe Biden's Health Have Continued to Mount

The question of President Joe Biden's health — or, more specifically, his mental acuity — has been a subject of debate for years now, with the now-81-year-old commander in chief having been caught in several gaffes and blunders that have led to scrutiny on his fitness.

Following the February 2024 release of a special counsel report, as well as the events of the June 2024 presidential debate, concerns have only been mounting about Biden's health.

In February 2024, a special counsel investigating Biden's possession of classified documents released a report that further fueled the fire around the question of the president's mental fitness.

The report described the president's memory as "hazy," "fuzzy," "faulty," "poor," and having "significant limitations."

Investigators noted in their report that Biden had trouble recalling milestone events in his life, including when his son Beau died of brain cancer or even when Biden himself served as the vice president.

The president noted after the report's release that his "memory is fine" and said specifically about his son Beau that "every Memorial Day we hold a service remembering him, attended by friends and family and the people who loved him; I don’t need anyone, I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away."

Meanwhile, the White House countered the report's accusations with a letter stating that the assessment of the president's memory was neither "accurate" nor "appropriate," explaining that the report used "highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events. Such comments have no place in a Department of Justice report."

Certainly not helping Biden's case has been the reoccurrence of blunders he's made in his speeches, including in February 2024 when he mistook Germany's Angela Merkel for the late former chancellor Helmut Kohl in his recollection of a 2021 conversation about the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks:

"When I first got elected president, I went to a G7 meeting with the seven heads of state in Europe and Great Britain," Biden said, later adding that "Helmut Kohl of Germany looked at me and said, 'What would you say, Mr. President, if you picked up the London Times tomorrow morning and learned that 1,000 people had broken down the doors, the doors of the British Parliament and killed some [people] on the way in?'"

After the gaffe, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre brushed off concerns by claiming the president's health was fine and that he simply misspoke, which "happens to all of us."

But that same week, in a similar blunder, Biden also confused France's Emmanuel Macron for former French president François Mitterrand in his recollection of a summit from his first year in office.

In addition to numerous errors during speeches, Biden further concerned voters during his appearance at the June 2024 debate against Donald Trump, with many viewers concerned that the president appeared to struggle with a raspy voice and slurred, stumbled speech.

A neurosurgeon who spoke to Fox News noted of Biden — who has previously undergone surgeries for two near-fatal brain aneurysms he had back in 1988 — that "[t]he odds have been stacked against him for years, long before his presidency."