Joe Biden is “just fine” after he fell up a flight of stairs as he boarded his presidential plane on Friday.
The US president, 78, stumbled three times as he climbed the steps on to Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland this morning.
He and Vice President Kamala Harris were on their way to Atlanta, Georgia, to meet the community devastated by Wednesday’s shooting that left eight people dead.
Mr Biden is the oldest person to assume the office of president
Mr Biden, who is the oldest person ever to become US president, managed to get back up unaided after the falls.
Wearing a mask, he turned to salute the military officer standing on the tarmac below before boarding the plane.
The White House said the president is “just fine and did not even require any attention from the medical team who travels with him”.
“Nothing more than a misstep on the stairs,” a spokesperson added.
And he can take some comfort from the fact that at least two of his predecessors have had similar trouble with those seemingly crafty steps.
Back in 2015, Mr Biden’s former boss Barack Obama nearly fell down the stairs leaving the plane after returning to Washington from a golf trip in Florida.
Gerald Ford took a nasty fall upon arrival in a rainy Austria in 1975.
And away from Air Force One, Mr Biden’s fellow Democrat and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton made headlines when she fell into the arms of her bodyguards during a 9/11 memorial service in 2016.
She later said she had been suffering from dehydration and pneumonia.
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Before leaving for Atlanta, Mr Biden expressed his sadness over the shootings in the city, of which the victims were mainly women of South Asian origin.
“While we do not yet know motive, as I said last week, we condemn in the strongest possible terms the ongoing crisis of gender-based and anti-Asian violence that has long plagued our nation,” he said in a statement on Twitter.
Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been arrested and charged with several counts of murder over the killings.
He has told detectives he was suffering from sex addiction and needed to eliminate any temptation by targeting spas and massage parlours.
