No, it wasn’t A.I. But it was no endorsement, either.
A smiling President Biden really did wear a Trump hat — for about five seconds — while visiting firefighters for an event commemorating the Sept. 11 attacks.
The unlikely moment, which played out on Wednesday at the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department in a Republican-leaning area of rural western Pennsylvania, soon turned into another example of America’s split-screen political culture.
It started as Mr. Biden exchanged friendly banter with a man wearing a red “Trump 2024” hat, offering him a blue cap with the presidential seal to put on instead. The man asked if the president would autograph the blue hat.
“Sure, I’ll autograph it,” Mr. Biden said. The man replied, “You remember your name?”
“I don’t remember my name,” the president joked. “I’m slow.”
The man teased, “You’re an old fart,” and Mr. Biden immediately agreed: “Yeah, I know, man, I’m an old guy.”
Then, after signing the blue hat, Mr. Biden told him, “I need that hat.”
The man took off his red Trump cap and handed it over, and Mr. Biden, at the urging of the crowd, put it on his head, over a baseball hat he was already wearing. The crowd — including the smiling and clapping Trump supporter — let out a cheer as the president grinned, displayed the hat to the firehouse and then took it off and shook the man’s hand.
Mr. Biden couldn’t resist one political jab, though: “Just remember, no eating dogs and cats,” he said to the crowd, referring to former President Donald J. Trump’s debunked debate claim that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been eating residents’ pets.
To those in the firehouse, and many who watched videos of the full exchange online, the moment was one of unity and levity by Mr. Biden, who has long prided himself on his ability to reach across the aisle.
But the still images of the Democratic president wearing the hat of his chief Republican antagonist quickly took on a life of their own in online conservative circles. Political attacks and conspiracy theories abounded, with some Republicans casting Mr. Biden’s move as a statement of real support, or painting him as a doddering fool who did not know what he was doing.
Perhaps trolling or perhaps not, Mr. Trump’s campaign joined in, saying on social media that Vice President Kamala Harris had done “so bad” in Tuesday night’s debate that “Joe Biden just put on a Trump hat.”
Trish Regan, a conservative television host who left Fox Business in March 2020 after calling concerns about the coronavirus an anti-Trump “scam,” declared in a post that the video offered evidence that Mr. Biden “doesn’t like” Ms. Harris, repeating a claim Mr. Trump had made on Tuesday at the debate. (Mr. Biden, whose full-throated endorsement of his vice president cleared her path to the Democratic nomination, told her he loved her at an event after she took over his teetering campaign in July.)
And Tim Young, a conservative commentator, wrote that Mr. Biden seemed “totally lost” during the encounter at the firehouse in Shanksville, near where Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, after its passengers fought back against hijackers.
A day after the fire station visit, Mr. Biden’s White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said his message had been one of bipartisanship — not, of course, one of support for Mr. Trump.
She told reporters that at the event, Mr. Biden had been recalling that the “country did come together” after the Sept. 11 attacks and had been trying to show that the United States should revive the spirit of that era.
“It didn’t matter what political party you were a part of,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said.
Brad Shober, the president of the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department, said in an interview on Friday that he was not so sure Mr. Biden had been trying to make a point about unity when he donned the cap.
But Mr. Shober, a Republican, scoffed at efforts to portray the president as having offered support to Mr. Trump, saying such characterizations were predictable but ridiculous. The exchange between Mr. Biden and the Trump supporter was “all in good fun,” Mr. Shober said.
“Anybody that’s trying to say different isn’t real smart, because they know darn well he isn’t going to endorse Trump,” he said, adding, “The dude put a hat on to make fun with the guy.”
Still, in a campaign awash with A.I. imagery and misleadingly edited or presented photos and videos, a sliver of voters might be confused by the pictures and not understand that it was a playful moment, said Nina Jankowicz, a researcher who briefly led an agency at the Department of Homeland Security created to fight disinformation.
Without watching the video in full or reading more about the exchange, she said, “there’s a possibility that some people will take it at face value.”
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