A grainy video of Joe Biden supposedly putting the Medal of Honor improperly on a Vietnam veteran has gained nearly one million views online. The only problem? It’s not true.
On 5 July, Mr Biden welcomed four Vietnam vets or their family members to the White House to receive the honour: specialist Dwight Birdwell, specialist Dennis Fujii, major John J Duffy, and staff sergeant Edward Kaneshiro, whose award was collected posthumously.
In a blurry clip of the ceremony, Mr Biden seems to put Mr Birdwell’s medal on backward.
“Oh my gosh, he did. Biden put his medal on backward. He’s declining before our eyes,” read the caption from one of the accounts spreading the clip.
As the fact-checkers at Snopes note, however, high-definition footage of the White House event clearly shows the president putting on the medal the right way.
“They stood in the way of danger,” the president said at the event. “Risked everything, literally everything to defend our nation and our values. However, not every service member has received the full recognition they deserve. Today, we’re setting the record straight. We’re upgrading the awards of four soldiers who performed acts of incredible heroism during the Vietnam conflict.”
Among the accounts that shared the clip was an ambassador for Turning Point USA, a conservative student group, pointing to the likely political reason the video got such traction: as a way to embarrass Joe Biden.
Following the lead of Donald Trump, who christened his 2020 opponent “Sleepy Joe”, conservatives have persistently attacked Mr Biden, at age 79, as too old and mentally unfit for the presidency.
At a recent rally, Mr Trump mocked the president’s stutter, claimed Mr Biden “has no idea what’s happening” and called on him to take a cognitive functioning test.
Of course, Mr Trump, 75, faced similar lines of attack while he was in the White House.
In 2020, the then-president took a cognitive test just to “shut these people up”, as he put it, from opining about his mental state.
Both men, in fact, are some of the oldest men to ever serve as president.
In fact, some critics argue that with many of the most powerful people in Washington — Nancy Pelosi, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — all in their 80s, the US could credibly be called a “gerontocracy”, much as the Soviet Union became in the decades just before its decline.
