Former President Donald Trump flubbed anchor Sage Steele's name at a town hall event, calling her "Paige."
"Thank you very much. Thank you. Let's have a little fun, Paige. OK?" Trump told Steele, who stood next to him onstage at Sunday's event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Steele moderated the town hall.
Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign quickly posted footage of the incident on X, formerly Twitter, where it had received more than 800,000 views by Monday morning.
The flub comes amid growing criticism of Trump's age and mental fitness, as he has made a series of verbal gaffes or has given incoherent answers to questions in recent months. Newsweek has contacted the Trump campaign via email for comment.
During a town hall on October 14, attendees reportedly began leaving early after Trump decided to stop taking questions from the audience and instead bobbed to music onstage for 39 minutes.
In another interview last week, Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait asked Trump about breaking up Alphabet, Google's parent company. Trump responded with a reference to a Department of Justice lawsuit involving voter roll purges in Virginia.
"The U.S. Justice Department is thinking about breaking up Alphabet, as Google likes to be known now. Should Google be broken up?" Micklethwait said.
Trump responded: "I just haven't gotten over something the Justice Department did yesterday, where Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad votes. And the Justice Department sued them—that they should be allowed to put those bad votes and illegal votes back in and let the people vote. So I haven't gotten—I haven't gotten over that. A lot of people have seen that. They can't even believe it."
In May, Trump called former President Jimmy Carter "Jimmy Connors," and in January, he confused Nikki Haley, then a Republican presidential candidate, with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump argued that Haley was "in charge of security" during the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
That same month, Trump appeared to confuse Biden with former President Barack Obama. At a February rally, the former president said he confused names on purpose.
"It's very hard to be sarcastic when I interpose," Trump told the crowd. "I'm not a Nikki fan, and I'm not a Pelosi fan. And when I purposely interpose names, they said, 'He didn't know Pelosi from Nikki from tricky Nikki, tricky Dicky."
"I interpose, and they make a big deal out of it," the former president continued. "I said: 'No, no, I think they both stink. They have something in common: They both stink.'"
If elected in November, the 78-year-old would be the oldest president in American history by the end of his term.
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