Biden nearly falls before leaving Alabama

President Biden faltered and nearly fell for at least the fourth time going up the steps of Air Force One on Sunday before boarding his flight back to Delaware from Alabama.

Biden, 80, visited the town of Selma to commemorate the 58th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march during the Civil Rights era and push for Congress to pass sweeping election reform before making his perilous way up to the plane hours later.

The oldest-ever president has staggered at least three other times when taking the stairs up to the aircraft, most recently when departing Poland after a three-day trip to Kyiv amid Ukraine’s ongoing war against Russia.

In May 2022, Biden lost but quickly regained his balance by grabbing the handrail while boarding the presidential airplane at Andrews Air Force Base before a trip to Illinois. The next month, he stumbled ahead of a flight to Los Angeles for the Summit of the Americas — and a week later took a spill from his bike while out for a ride in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Former president Donald Trump used the bike incident to ridicule Biden during his weekend speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, saying: “We all smile when he falls down stairs and things. It’s cute, when he falls off his bicycle.”

Biden also stumbled twice and fell to one knee when bounding up to Air Force One in March 2021 before traveling to Georgia to attack Republican-passed state election legislation, which he called “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” Then-White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said a gust of wind precipitated the fall.

The missteps have made Biden an easy target for Republicans who see the president as not physically or mentally fit enough to serve. Presidential physician Kevin O’Connor in February made note in a five-page report of Biden’s “significant spinal arthritis, mild post-fracture foot arthritis and a mild sensory peripheral neuropathy of the feet.”

GOP presidential hopeful and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley has called during her campaign for annual mental competency tests for politicians who are older than 75 years.

During the speech he delivered in Selma, Biden also claimed he “was a student up north in the civil rights movement” — a remark he has made, without evidence, for decades.

“I remember feeling how guilty I was; I wasn’t here,” the commander-in-chief said. “How could we all be up there, and you going through what you went through.”

Since the 1980s, Biden has asserted varying degrees of involvement in the Civil Rights movement, at one point highlighting his work “at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, Delaware.” He admitted, though, after his failed 1988 presidential campaign that he “was not an activist.”

“I was involved in what they were thinking, what they were feeling. But I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans,” he said in October 1987 after dropping out of the race.

Nevertheless when he served as vice president, Biden told attendees at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast in 2014 he “was involved in desegregating movie theaters.” And when running for president five years later, Biden told deep-pocketed donors during a San Francisco fundraiser that he “got involved in the civil rights movement as a kid.”

Last year, the president even told students at two historically black colleges in Atlanta that he had been arrested for his role in the movement.

“I did not walk in the shoes of generations of students who walked these grounds, but I walked other grounds,” he said on the campus of Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University in January 2022. “Because I’m so damn old, I was there as well. You think I’m kidding, man. It seems like yesterday the first time I got arrested. Anyway.”

The president has yet to announce his 2024 presidential campaign but first lady Jill Biden said in February that her husband is “not done” and will kick off his candidacy in the coming months.