Biden, 81, is seen shuffling out of Delaware clothes shop

By Stephen M. Lepore For Dailymail.Com

04:39 26 May 2024, updated 05:42 26 May 2024

Joe Biden was spotted leaving after going clothes shopping in his home state of Delaware, as the president was seen in his usual weekend haunts for the Memorial Day holiday. 

Biden, at 81 the oldest president in American history, was seen slowly shuffling out of a Jos. A. Bank in Greenville holding a bag and accompanied by multiple Secret Service agents.

The president flipped on his famous aviator sunglasses before getting back into his vehicle. 

Greenville is a short drive away from Wilmington, where the Biden family compound is located.

Biden is notorious for preferring his weekends in his home state to Washington or Camp David during his presidency. 

It was a busy day for the president, as earlier Saturday, he delivered the commencement address at the Military Academy at West Point in New York.

Biden was accused of repeating a long running lie that he was appointed to a Naval Academy in 1965. 

The president had been delivering the commencement speech at the Military Academy at West Point, New York, when he made the remarks to 1,036 cadets.

During the ceremony, Biden told the crowd of graduates that he had been ‘appointed’ to the Naval Academy. 

Biden said: ‘I was appointed by a fella I ran against when I was 29-years-old to the Naval Academy. I was one of ten, I wanted to play football.

‘The day I was supposed to go down for the interview, a class mate of mine who was also one of the ten appointed to be chosen from.’

Biden continued: ‘He came to pick me up, I found out two days earlier that they had a quarterback named Roger Staubach and a halfback named Joe Bellino. I said oh I’m not going there, I went to Delaware.’ 

Biden had previously made this same claim while addressing graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy in 2022. 

Biden said that Delaware Sen. J. Caleb Boggs, who he ran against in 1972, had tried to get him into the Annapolis school seven years previously.  

Click here to resize this module

The New York Post reported at the time that curators for the Delaware Historical Association went ‘box-by-box’ searching for Academy nominations. 

Chief curator Leigh Rifenburg had told the outlet that the claim made by the president was ‘unlikely’.

Also during his speech on Saturday, the president stumbled through one sentence when talking about Putin and NATO. 

He said: ‘Putin was certain that NATO would fracture right after I was sworn in. We talked about this very issue. 

‘The fall, he tied, that fall he decided, look I shouldn’t get into this probably. But it gets me a little excited.’

Gaffes aside, the president used his speech to emphasize the critical role of US support to allies around the world including Israel, Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific. 

Biden described American soldiers as ‘working around the clock’ to support Ukraine in its effort to repel a two-year long Russian invasion, but repeated his commitment to keeping them off the front lines.

‘We are standing strong with Ukraine and we will stand with them,’ Biden told the crowd to a round of applause.

Click here to resize this module

He also highlighted the U.S. role in repelling Iranian missile attacks against Israel and support for allies in the Indo-Pacific against increasing Chinese militarism in the region.

‘Thanks to the U.S. Armed Forces, we’re doing what only America can do as the indispensable nation, the world’s only superpower,’ Biden said.

As vice president, he twice addressed a graduating class of cadets at the academy about 40 miles north of New York City, but this was the first time as president.

Donald Trump, Biden’s Republican challenger in the 2024 election, was the last president to speak at a West Point commencement, in 2020.

The weekend comes after another rough week of headlines for the president as he tries to win a second term.

Much of the news came from Republicans who had supported the president in 2020 saying that Biden was losing their support this time around.

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu is predicting that Biden’s $167 billion student loan forgiveness plan is actually going to come back and bite him.

Just this week, Biden cancelled another $7.7 billion for 160,000 Americans, in a push that critics view as an attempt to ‘buy votes’ ahead of the 2024 election. 

Click here to resize this module

But Sununu tells DailyMail.com in an exclusive sit-down interview this week that no debt is actually being wiped out. 

He says Biden’s ’26 year old progressive socialist’ advisors who are ‘very passionate politically’ but ‘don’t have a brain in their head about what’s actually happening on the ground in America with inflation’ are at fault.

‘Biden is going out and actually throwing gasoline on that fire. And then bragging about it,’ and it will cost him the election, Sununu tells DailyMail.com.

Meanwhile, Christopher Shays, a former GOP Congressman from Connecticut who voted for Biden in 2020, now says he’s ‘unlikely’ to make the leap for the president again this November.

He asked: ‘A lot of us are wrestling with, how can we support him when he’s gone so far to the left?’ 

Shays, who served in the House from 1987 to 2009, is now considering voting for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

According to a New York Times report, Shays shares the sentiments of many Republicans who flipped for Biden in 2020, saying they’ve felt largely ignored by his time in office.

The latest blow to Biden’s efforts to court the GOP: Nikki Haley’s admission that she will vote for Trump.

A series of recent polls have showed Trump level or ahead of Biden in swing states he won in 2020. 

And according to a New York Times survey this month, Biden is trailing Trump in five out of six crucial battleground states.