US President Joe Biden had some trouble at the event marking the 80th anniversary of the Western Allies’ landing in Normandy, France on Thursday. A viral video of him attempting to sit down has triggered widespread speculation about his health.
French President Emmanuel Macron hosted Biden and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the American memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer. In June 1944, American troops suffered heavy casualties capturing the beach designated “Omaha” from the Germans.
A twelve-second video from the ceremony, which made the rounds on Thursday, showed the US president looking for his chair, while the French leader and both their respective wives kept standing.
“Awkward,” said the only caption posted on X (formerly Twitter) by RNC Research, an account run by the US Republican Party and the presidential campaign of Biden’s rival Donald Trump. It garnered over 1.9 million views in four hours.
Some X users described Biden as looking “completely lost” or “having some kind of episode.” Several claimed he was attempting to sit “on a non-existent chair.”
“There is a chair behind him. He starts to sit but Jill says not yet,” another X user explained. The video showed Jill Biden covering her mouth, prompting speculation that she had instructed her husband to “stand up, Joe.”
Another popular theory was that Biden had soiled himself.
“Is there ever a time when Americans realize just how much of an embarrassment this is on a world stage?” Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. said as he reposted the video. “Does this kind of incompetence and weakness encourage our enemies to act the way they’ve been acting? Of course it does!”
Another video shared by RNC Research showed Jill Biden walking her husband away from the stage, while Macron stayed behind to shake hands with a handful of surviving veterans of the Normandy operation.
Biden, 81, is the oldest US president ever to take the oath of office. He has been dogged by rumors about his physical health and mental acuity for years, but insisted that he was perfectly fine and more capable than ever.
With all the attention on Biden’s awkward behavior, some of the things he said in Normandy went unnoticed. The US leader appeared to use his speech honoring the American veterans of WWII – who fought on the same side as the Soviet Union – to drum up support for a war against Russia in the present day.
“We cannot surrender to the bullies, it is simply unthinkable. If we do, freedom will be subjugated, all Europe will be threatened,” Biden said, warning that NATO and democracy were “more at risk now than at any point since World War II.”
France initially said it would invite a Russian delegation to the anniversary events, but decided against it last month. The Soviet Union did the lion’s share of the fighting against Nazi Germany in WWII.