‘Sleepy Joe’? Biden’s Israel schedule includes nap break

An NY Times report said “rest time” was also scheduled between the president’s European and Mideast trips. 

By Debbie Reiss, World Israel News

President Joe Biden’s schedule for his two-day trip to Israel includes a long nap break on Thursday, a veteran Israeli journalist said.

“In Biden’s official schedule for Thursday about two hours are currently allotted for an afternoon nap,” Amichai Stein, from the Kan public broadcaster, wrote on Twitter. His tweet was accompanied by an image of the president appearing to nap during the UN Climate Change Conference last November.

The news comes after a report by The New York Times on Sunday saying the White House had separated Biden’s trips to Europe and the Middle East by a few weeks due to concerns of overtaxing the elderly president.

Biden was originally scheduled to fly straight to Israel and Saudi Arabia after his week-long trip to Germany and Spain late last month, but the second half of the journey was delayed until this week.

The White House is reportedly keen to score a public foreign policy win on the Mideast trip to shore up support for the president, amid declining popularity ratings ahead of the midterms.

The U.S. has billed the visit as a way to further peace in the region by taking another step towards normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. the additional weeks between the two trips also allowed for further closed-door negotiations between the two U.S. allies.

At 79, Biden is America’s oldest president; he is a year older than ex-president Ronald Reagan was after his two terms had ended.

Biden’s physician last year noted that his walking was “perceptibly stiffer and less fluid.” Last month, he stumbled as he boarded Air Force One.

The president also famously trips up in speech too, with the latest gaffe occurring Wednesday from the tarmac of Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, when he called on the world to remember the “truth and honor of the Holocaust.” He quickly noticed the slip and corrected himself to say “horror.”

He has called his deputy “President Harris” on several occasions and has referred to “Iranians” instead of “Ukrainians.”