Biden tells Polish leader he wanted to add ‘s-k-i’ to last name

What’s a little ethnic humor between world leaders?​

President Biden joked with his Polish counterpart on Tuesday that he wanted to add “ski” or “o” to his last name because he purportedly lived in an area of Delaware with a large population of Poles and Italians and wanted to fit in.

Biden, 80, who was in Warsaw to mark the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ​talked after his bilateral meeting with Poland President Andrzej Duda about his family’s big move.

“As a young man, I was born in a coal town of Scranton, Pa., in northeastern Pennsylvania, in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. Then when coal died, we moved down to Delaware, to a town called Claymont, Del., which was a working-class town,” Biden recalled. “But everyone in town was either Polish or Italian. I grew up feeling self-conscious my name didn’t end in an ‘s-k-i’ or an ‘o.’”

The comment was similar to other remarks Biden has made about his supposed connection to other racial, national, or minority groups.

In October of last year, Biden told an audience in Puerto Rico that “I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically” — despite the fact that only about 2,000 people of Puerto Rican ancestry lived in Delaware when Biden was launching his political career in the early 1970s.

Biden in September 2021 told Jewish leaders that he remembered “spending time at” and “going to” Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 after the worst anti-semitic attack in US history, in which 11 people were murdered. The synagogue said he never visited and the White House later said he was thinking about a 2019 phone call to the synagogue’s rabbi.

In January of last year, Biden told students at historically black colleges in Atlanta that he was arrested multiple times while protesting for civil rights — another claim for which there is no evidence.

During his presidential campaign, Biden claimed to have been “raised in the black church politically” and been a teenage civil rights organizer at Union Baptist Church in Wilmington. However, longtime church members later claimed Biden never attended services or took part in organizing demonstrations as a youth.

Biden’s stop in Warsaw followed a surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday. He met with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, pledged another $460 million in military aid and toured the war-torn city as air raid sirens blared overhead.