‘Sounds like my 4yo’: Joe Biden’s awkward spending blunder during speech

The US President appeared to invent a vast new number while taking an apparent jab at his predecessor Donald Trump.

Joe Biden appeared to invent a vast new number as he tried to boast about his administration’s massive infrastructure spending – a brain-twisting bungle that the White House then sought to downplay in its official transcript.

“On my watch, instead of Infrastructure Week, America is having Infrastructure Decade,” the US President told a crowd of union members in Las Vegas on Friday in a speech touting federally-funded railroad projects, the New York Post reports.

“Over a billion three-hundred million trillion three-hundred million dollars!” Mr Biden exclaimed.

“Trump just talks the talk, we walk the walk.”

The jab was meant as a swipe at Mr Biden’s predecessor, former president Donald Trump, who did not pass such spending bills through Congress during his tenure. But the moment drew mockery online.

US President Joe Biden. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP

“Why does the President of the United States sound exactly like my 4-year-old when he’s trying to come up with the highest possible number?” one of Mr Biden’s critics, Oren Ross, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Why does the President of the United States sound exactly like my 4 year old when he’s trying to come up with the highest possible number?

— Oren Ross (@OrenRoss2) December 9, 2023

On Saturday local time, nearly 18 hours after the speech, the White House press office released a transcript that papered over the error by expressing it numerically, as “over 1,300,000,000 – $1,000,300,000,000” – hinting that the President had merely missed a few zeros on his teleprompter rather than dabbling in some new form of budgetary math.

The verbal stumble was the latest in a long string of Mr Biden’s gaffes, contributing to widespread voter worries about the 81-year-old’s mental acuity and fitness for office.

In the same speech, Mr Biden shared for at least the 13th time since taking office a debunked story involving a late Amtrak conductor who supposedly exclaimed “Joey, baby!” while extolling Mr Biden’s lifetime rail ridership.

This article originally appeared on the New York Post and was reproduced with permission