President Joe Biden repeated the infamous “very fine people hoax” on Thursday evening in Brussels, Belgium, falsely claiming that his predecessor praised neo-Nazis who rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

The President was speaking at a press conference to close the NATO summit on Ukraine. A European reporter asked the president how he could be sure that his successor in 2024 would not undo his diplomatic approach to NATO. (President Trump irked European powers by demanding that they live up to their NATO commitment of spending at least 2% of gross domestic product on defense. Germany belatedly agreed, finally, to meet its commitment only after Russia had invaded Ukraine.)

Biden, claiming that he did not think about his foreign policy decisions in pure the electoral terms, referred to the familiar origin story that he has told since 2019 when claiming that Charlottesville motivated him to come out of retirement and run for president.