Joe Biden forgets he’s in NYC, Keir Starmer will meet Trump for first time
US President Joe Biden made another major gaffe during a speech in New York, ahead of a first meeting between British PM Keir Starmer and Donald Trump. Follow updates.
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US President Joe Biden has made another gaffe during a speech in New York, when he mistakenly welcomed world leaders to “Washington”.
In the speech at a Manhattan hotel, Mr Biden gave thanks to the leaders gathered for the annual UN General Assembly, saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. Welcome to Washington.”
Mr Biden continued on with his speech seemingly without realising he made the error and reaffirmed US support for Ukraine amid ongoing conflict with Russia.
“Fellow leaders, friends, for 944 days [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has waged his vicious onslaught against Ukraine,” he said at the gathering of Western leaders reaffirming their support for Kyiv.
The event was timed to coincide with the annual meeting of the United National General Assembly in New York, which Biden addressed earlier in the week.
Mr Biden spoke ahead of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the event.
The American leader called his counterpart “Mr President” without using his surname.
Mr Biden’s latest gaffe comes as the outgoing US president has faced scrutiny over his mental and physical fitness for office.
In July, Mr Biden stunned attendees of the annual NATO summit, at which Mr Biden introduced Mr Zelensky as “President Putin”, making that error just hours before also calling Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump”.
Soon after, he announced he would not seek re-election, paving the way for Ms Harris.
Speakers following Mr Biden included UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who appeared in-person and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who spoke via video feed.
Mr Biden is the oldest-ever American president and ended his campaign for a second term on July 21 after a disastrous debate against former President Donald Trump on June 27, at which the incumbent appeared confused and made incoherent remarks such as that he “finally beat Medicare”.
Mr Biden has rejected calls for his resignation from leading Republicans and even some Democrats.
“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President. He must resign the office immediately,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in July after Mr Biden stepped aside and endorsed Ms Harris as the Democratic nominee.
“I doubt the president’s judgment about his health, his fitness to do the job, and whether he is the one making important decisions about our country, rather than unelected advisers,” Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez said days earlier.
“Americans deserve to feel their president is fit enough to do the job.”
Mr Biden will be a one-term president when his term ends on January 20.
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BRITISH PM TO MEET TRUMP
British PM Keir Starmer will meet Donald Trump for the first time today.
Starmer is expected to hold a face-to-face with the Republican candidate at his Trump Tower in New York.
It comes after British Foreign Secretary David Lammy described Mr Trump as a “neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”.
Home Office Minister Angela Eagle this week accused Mr Trump of helping to breed racism in Britain.
Starmer, in the US for the UN General Assembly, said the meeting will be “really to establish a relationship between the two of us.”
“I’m a great believer in personal relations on the international stage.
“I think it really matters you know who your counterpart is in any given country and know them personally, get to know them face-to-face.”
BIDEN SAYS HE WOULD’VE BEATEN ‘LOSER’ TRUMP
Mr Biden said he would have beaten “loser” Donald Trump in the US election but dropped out of the race anyway.
In a disjointed and contradictory interview on US daytime talk show The View, Mr Biden gave conflicting reasons for his shock replacement on the Democratic ticket by Kamala Harris.
“I never fully believed the assertions that somehow there was this overwhelming reluctance of my running again. I didn’t sense that,” Mr Biden said. “The fact of the matter is, my polling was about where, you know, about always within range of beating this guy.
“I was confident I would beat Trump – he’s a loser.”
Despite the confidence, Mr Biden said he stepped down anyway because of his age and not pressure from the party, adding that “it’s hard to even say how old I am”.
“It’s like, ‘Holy God, that can’t be right’,” he said. It was Mr Biden’s first direct admission that his age played a role on his ouster by Democratic Party elites.
“There were some folks who liked to see me step aside, so they have a chance to move on, I get that, that’s just human nature, but that wasn’t the reason I stepped down,” he said.
Mr Biden said he always planned on stepping down but his administration was so successful he found himself needing more than then he “would have ordinarily to pass that torch”.
It contradicts his first comments on the withdrawal when he said his leadership “merited a second term”, but that he passed the torch to a new generation to save democracy.
Asked about his relationship with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who orchestrated the pressure campaign for his ouster, Mr Biden suggested she wasn’t responsible for his stepping down.
“The relationship is fine,” he said, before pausing and laughing.
SECRET SERVICE AGENT ACCUSED OF SEXUAL ASSAULT OF HARRIS STAFFER
A US Secret Service agent is being investigated over the alleged sexual assault of a Kamala Harris staffer.
According to RealClearPolitics, the agent allegedly forced himself on to the woman and groped her in her hotel room after eating a meal and drinking alcohol with her and several other Harris campaign staffers in a restaurant in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
The group is said to have been in Wisconsin to scout out campaign stops for the vice-president.
The outlet reported that the agent’s actions toward the Harris campaign staffer “were apparently witnessed by other people present”.
The federal agency, already under fire over security lapses after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, confirmed to NBC News: “The employee has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.”
Harris’s campaign office in a statement: “We have zero tolerance for sexual misconduct. Senior OVP [Office of the Vice President] officials were alerted by the USSS about an incident involving an agent and informed that USSS initiated an investigation.”
SHOTS FIRED AT HARRIS CAMPAIGN OFFICE
Gunshots have been fired at one of Vice President Kamala Harris campaign offices, police have revealed.
Several bullets were fired into the Democratic National Committee campaign office in Tempe, Arizona, after midnight on Monday (local time) causing damage.
“No one was inside the office during the overnight hours, but this raises concerns about the safety of those who work in that building, as well as those nearby,” Tempe Police Department’s Public Information Officer Sgt. Ryan Cook told The Post.
Detectives are collecting are analysing evidence from the scene and extra security measures have been put in place.
This is the second time in a matter of weeks the Arizona office has been criminally damaged.
The gunshots come days after an alleged second assassination attempt on former president and Republican candidate Donald Trump while he was playing golf at his Florida course.
It comes as American is on a knife’s edge with presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump unable to be separated in the latest opinion polls.
The highly regarded Quinnipiac University National Poll shows Mr Trump just ahead at 48 per cent to Harris’ 47 per cent.
However CNN’s latest findings show Ms Harris at 48 per cent and Mr Trump at 47 per cent.
The shift since the last national polls were taken in July in the aftermath of President Joe Biden stepping down from the race has been dramatic.
Back then, Mr Trump was clearly leading at 49 per cent to Ms Harris’ 46 per cent.
TRUMP DROPS HITLER’S NAME AT RALLY
Mr Trump addressed a rally in Georgia where he made a bizarre prediction about the outcome of the war between Ukraine and Russia.
“They beat Hitler, they beat Napoleon. That’s what they do,” Trump said, proclaiming he believed Russia would emerge from the fight victorious.
Mr Trump also used the rally to make cruel digs at President Biden’s appearance and claim Ms Harris, who decisively defeated him in their recent debate, is suffering “cognitive problems.”
The former president also claimed other countries are deliberately sending their criminals to the US – a statement which remains unsubstantiated.
‘SOME THINGS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN STAYING IN POWER’
US President Joe Biden gave rare insight on dropping out of the US election race against Donald Trump, saying “some things are more important than staying in power.”
In one of the few times he has commented on his stunning withdrawal and rapid replacement by Kamala Harris, Mr Biden maintained that he wasn’t pushed off the Democratic ticket by party elites.
“This summer, I faced a decision whether to seek a second term as president. It was a difficult decision. Being president has been the honour of my life, there’s so much more I want to get done,” Biden said. “As much as I love the job, I love my country more.”
“I decided after 50 years of public service it’s time for a new generation of leadership to take my nation forward.
“My fellow leaders, let us never forget, some things are more important than staying in power,” he in his final address to the United Nations General Assembly. “It’s your people that matter the most.”
Biden quit the White House race in July after a disastrous TV debate against Trump fuelled concerns about his age. He endorsed his vice president Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.
TRUMP SLAMS OPRAH
Donald Trump addressed thousands of his supporters at a rally in western Pennsylvania on Tuesday, a key battleground state that propelled him to the 2016 presidency but flipped for Joe Biden in 2020.
An estimated 5000 people attended the event in Indiana where the presidential candidate opened his speech by attacking Oprah Winfrey and immigrants.
He addressed Ukraine War saying if he was elected president again he would get Vladimir Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin together and make them agree to stop.
Mr Trump claimed the US was partly to blame for what was unfolding over there because of President Joe Biden’s lack of action.
PANIC GROWS AS NEW POLLS SHOW CLEAR LEADER
Democratic Party operatives fear support for Donald Trump is being underestimated as the former president begins to surge in the three key battleground states of the “Sun Belt”.
A poll released by The New York Times/Siena College shows Mr Trump leading Kamala Harris in Arizona (50 per cent to 45 per cent), Georgia (49 per cent to 45 per cent) and North Carolina (49 per cent to 47 per cent).
The result reversed Ms Harris’ five-point lead over Mr Trump in Arizona, and two-point lead in North Carolina, from the same poll in August. He now leads in the three states in the RealClearPolitics average for the Sun Belt.
If he wins the Sun Belt, Mr Trump would only have to pick up one of the three “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin while Ms Harris would have to run the board and win all three.
It comes as Democratic insiders worry that Ms Harris’ position is even more dire than public polling suggests, with Senators in the must-win states of Pennsylvania and Georgia warning Mr Trump may over perform polls like he did in 2016 and 2020.
“Polling has really been seriously damaged since 2016. And that’s one of the truths, is that Trump is going to be tough in Pennsylvania, and that’s absolutely the truth,” Senator John Fetterman told The Hill when asked if Trump was being underestimated in Pennsylvania.
Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock added it’s impossible to know who was ahead in the race, saying the only poll that matters is on election day.
Privately, two other senators were more scathing of Ms Harris’ narrow lead in the national polls, which she ekes out by 2.2 points.
“That’s ominous. There’s no question that is concerning, but you’re working as hard as you can work, no matter what. My sense there’s not a lot more you can do than we’re already doing,” one said of Ms Harris lagging Mr Biden and Hillary Clinton at this stage of the race.
Another added they were “surprised” at Mr Trump’s resilience in the polls despite legal setbacks and being heavily out spent by the Harris campaign.
TENSIONS GROW IN HARRIS CAMP
While Ms Harris had unprecedentedly positive coverage in the first weeks of her candidacy, tensions within the campaign would grow with “subtle finger pointing” if the polls continued to worsen, according to Axios.
“A lot of these people, are not people that she hired that are on this campaign. It’s sort of a combination of Biden people, who she doesn’t totally trust, her own people, plus all these Obama 2012 operatives,” said Axios writer Alex Thompson.
“As long as the polls are good, then things are going to keep going well. But if the polling ever turns south, there are a lot of, sort of, subtle tensions within this world, and you could start seeing some subtle finger-pointing.”
QUESTIONS OVER MELANIA TRUMP SPEECH
Former first lady Melania Trump raised eyebrows over a rare campaign appearance for a six-figure pay check.
Mrs Trump was paid $A350,000 for a “speaking engagement” at an event in April for the Log Cabin Republicans, according to a financial disclosure form first reported by CNN.
Log Cabin Republicans president Charles Moran told CNN the group did not fund the speaking engagement. A similar payment was made to Mrs Trump at a fundraiser in July for the group, sources told the outlet.
Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, said payments to candidate spouses was unusual and could violate ethics rules.
“It seems pretty self-serving. From my own general observation, I’m not used to seeing that,” she said.
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