President Biden’s wince-inducing series of stumbles while boarding Air Force One on Friday calls to mind Gerald Ford’s 1975 fall on the same stairs — a minor tumble that forever tarred him as a clumsy oaf.
Chevy Chase pilloried Ford in a series of ruthless and hilarious “Saturday Night Live” skits — even though the object of his ridicule was just 62 years old, and an ex-University of Michigan football star who avidly skied and golfed.
But Ford’s caught-on-camera stumble down the rain-slicked steps of Air Force One in Austria — plus a Biden-esque trip while climbing up the same set of stairs in Michigan soon afterward — was all Chase needed to crown Ford the Klutz-in-Chief.
As a bumbling Ford, Chase’s ham-handed handling of the Resolute Desk telephone and his lurching pratfalls continued week after week — to the point where the president decided he needed to clap back.
At a Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner later in 1975, Ford was climbing to the podium to speak when he sneakily yanked the edge of the tablecloth where Chase was sitting — sending tableware flying the comedian’s way.
Ford made sure to loo��﷽k back over his shoulder in mock surprise.
“I’m Gerald Ford, and you’re not,” he deadpanned to Chase after inviting the comedian to perform at a White House dinner in March 1976, stealing the show as the audience burst into applause and laughter.
Other presidents — and would-be presidents — have survived their own trips꧟ and falls relatively unscathed.
In 2011, Hillary Clinton, then President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, fell as she boarded a plane leaving Yemen.
“You know, those things happen,” she shrugged later.
Then-presidential candidate Bob Dole fell off a stage while campaigning in 1🥃9ও96. President George H.W. Bush fell while bowling in Milwaukee during the 1992 campaign. And his son, President George W. Bush, famously fell off a Segway in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 2003.