“She was 12, and I was 30,” are the President’s remarks many conservatives took issue with on Friday (September 23).
Speaking at an event for the largest teacher’s union in the country, the National Education Association, President Joe Biden made cryptic remarks about a friendship he had with a 12-year-old girl who was 18 years his junior at the time.
The President made the remarks when he briefly interrupted his address on climate change to point out a woman in the audience and tell her she had to greet him.
Before making the interjection, Biden said, “And everybody found out, there’s not a lot of total climate deniers anymore after they’ve seen what happened this year. But guess what, we got a lot to do,” he then stopped before completing the statement.
In a lower voice, while pointing to someone in the crowd, he said, “You gotta say hi to me.”
His interruption drew laughter from the crowd as Biden continued, “We go back a long way. She was 12, and I was 30, but anyway. This woman helped me get an awful lot done. Anyway.”
Although his second statement drew laughs from the crowd, not everyone found the President’s off-the-cuff comments endearing.
Instead, many conservatives took to social media to point out the sinister implication such statements could have.
Monica Crowley, a conservative podcast host and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, wrote on Twitter, “As dementia progresses, patients lose more of their filter and tend to blurt out the truth. Biden: ‘She was 12, I was 30.'”
Miranda Devine questioned if there was anything that cleared Biden of the blatant guilt, “Is there any exculpatory context to this?” she tweeted.
Others reposted the phrase alongside the hashtag “#creepyjoe.”
