Joe Biden's Comments About Puerto Ricans Have Twitter Seeing Red
President Joe Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was partially raised, until his family moved to New Castle, Delaware, where our current commander in chief spent the rest of his childhood (via Britannica). According to current data, Scranton is over 71% white, with no households reporting speaking a language other than English. Meanwhile, New Castle's population of just over 5,000 people is made up of 67.5% whites and 1.83% of people who identify as Hispanic. English was the primary language spoken at the homes of all the latest respondents in Biden's hometown to the 2020 U.S. census. This data doesn't reflect a huge shift from when Biden was growing up there.
Despite these facts, the POTUS spoke about his, um, Puerto Rican roots during a visit to the hurricane-ravaged island this week (via NBC News). "I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically," Biden told an audience on Monday. Biden also said at one point, "We have a very, in relative terms, a large Puerto Rican population in Delaware relative to our population" via New York Post.
The Democrat's comments come hot on the heels of First Lady Jill Biden comparing Hispanic people in Texas to breakfast tacos this past July, which landed her in very hot water.
Now it's her husband's turn to face the music on Twitter.
Some people are amused by Joe Biden's puzzling reference while others are not
"Joe Biden just seriously tried to go to Puerto Rico and tell them he's Puerto Rican too," one Twitter user reacted upon the President's interesting choice of words to Fiona survivors going viral.
Other social media users employed humor in addressing the comments. One individual joked that the leader had just made himself "the worst" president of Puerto Rican dissent ever, while someone else referred to another cringey moment during Biden's tenure in office, noting he hadn't fallen up a flight of stairs, but rather "was doing the salsa" since he was raised around Puerto Ricans. Finally, yet another Twitter user said, "So apparently not only can Joe Biden see dead people, he's also Puerto Rican," recalling the President's flub in accidentally inquiring after the whereabouts of Jackie Walorski, a legislator who died in a car crash this summer.
But some folks were not amused, like this Twitter user who commented, "Biden is anything he chooses to be at the moment to get votes. He always was a pathological liar!"