Biden Says His Uncle May Have Been Eaten by Cannibals

President Joe Biden said Wednesday that his "Uncle Bosie" may have been eaten by cannibals on the Australian island of New Guinea during World War II.

Biden made the comments to the press around 12:05 p.m. Wednesday at Wilkes-Barre Scranton International Airport in Avoca, Pennsylvania, before departing for Pittsburgh to speak to union steelworkers and make an election pitch that includes tripling tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum to protect American producers.

On Tuesday, the president visited Scranton and pitched a new tax plan he said would benefit middle-class American families. He later visited his childhood home before speaking at the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America Local Union 445. One campaign stop was claimed by conservatives to be full of empty seats but was disputed by reporters in the room.

"Ambrose Finnegan—we called him Uncle Bosie—he was shot down," Biden said Wednesday, per a pool report. "He was Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force. He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn't make it.

"He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time."

Biden discussed his family history when asked by a member of the press about his visit to the Veterans War Memorial in Scranton the day before. He said he wanted to see where his uncle, Ambrose, was memorialized and the World War II memorial.

The President said that the day after D-Day occurred, all four of his mother's brothers went down to volunteer and enter military service. Three of the four were accepted, he said, while one was "4-F" or unfit for military service due to physical, mental or moral reasons.

"They never recovered [Ambrose's] body," he added. "But the government went back, when I went down there, and they checked and found some parts of the plane and the like."

He also took an opportunity to make a dig at Donald Trump, who he defeated in the 2020 election and is in a back-and-forth with in numerous election polls as the November election looms. One online prediction market, Polymarket, currently lists Biden as having a 45 percent chance of winning in November, narrowly ahead of Trump at 44 percent.

"And what I was thinking about when I was standing there was when Trump refused to go up to the memorial for veterans in Paris, and he said they were a bunch of 'suckers' and "losers,'" Biden said.

"To me, that is such a disqualifying assertion made by a president— 'suckers' and 'losers.' The guys who saved civilization in the 1940s—'suckers' and 'losers.'"