By Staff, Agencies

US President Joe Biden gave several radio interviews and delivered a brief Fourth of July speech on Thursday, in an apparent attempt to reassure voters of his mental capacity to hold office, following a disastrous debate with his Republican rival Donald Trump.

Biden openly admitted he “screwed up” the debate, but told The Earl Ingram Show that he will “get back up,” rejecting any intention of dropping out of the presidential race.

“I had a bad night.... And the fact of the matter is that, you know, I screwed up,” Biden said, after his aides spent a week offering various excuses from an alleged preparation overload, to a minor cold and a jet lag from a trip 12 days prior to the debate.

During a separate interview with Philadelphia’s WURD, the gaffe-prone US leader struggled to find the right phrase while apparently trying to refer to Vice President Kamala Harris and recall his time in Barack Obama’s administration.

“By the way, I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first black woman... to serve with a black president. Proud to be involved of the first black woman on the Supreme Court. There’s so much that we can do because... look, we’re the United States of America,” Biden said.

The US president also delivered a four-minute speech at the White House, focusing his remarks on his visit last month to Normandy, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, but seemingly veered off script and lost his train of thought several times, and at one point even called his rival Trump a “colleague.”

“And by the way, you know I was in that WWI cemetery in France, and.... the one that one of our colleagues, the former president, did not wanna go and be up there... I shouldn’t probably have said it anyway,” Biden said before abruptly cutting the story short, and continuing his prepared remarks.

In another clip scrutinized and mocked by critics, Biden greeted the crowd with a lively “Ho! Ho! Ho! Happy Independence Day!”, after Harris almost mistakenly introduced him as the vice president.