President Joe Biden has been raising eyebrows with several misleading statements he has made in recent weeks.
And on Monday, in an unusual move, The Washington Post published a round-up of statements the president said and fact-checked them.
Glenn Kessler, the paper’s fact-checker, wrote, “Biden is a self-described ‘gaffe machine.’ That’s no excuse, of course, for a president making false or misleading statements.”
He explained readers had asked for a fact check for “a variety of recent Biden statements, but none of them seemed big enough for a stand-alone fact check.”
“We generally do not award Pinocchios for roundups like this — but for reasons that will become clear, we need to make an exception for the first one,” he added.
ICYMI –> A Bottomless Pinocchio for Biden — and other recent gaffes https://t.co/aX6n1eHTGQ
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) November 7, 2022
The first statement from Biden involved his claim that he traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Kessler noted the Post had already debunked that claim because there is “no evidence Biden traveled that much with Xi, the president of China — and even if we added up the miles Biden flew to see Xi, it still did not total 17,000 miles.”
“But it’s noteworthy because, despite our fact check and a White House admission that Biden’s line of ‘traveling with’ Xi was not accurate, with this comment, Biden had made the claim 20 times during his presidency,” he explained.
He also recalled the Post created the category of a “bottomless Pinocchio” during former President Donald Trump’s tenure for “false or misleading statements repeated so often that they became a form of propaganda.”
“A statement would get added to the list if it had earned a Three or Four Pinocchios rating and been repeated at least 20 times. By the end of the Trump presidency, 56 claims made by Trump had qualified,” the fact-checker continued. “Now Biden has earned his own Bottomless Pinocchio.”
The other statement in the list included Biden’s claim that “the most common price of gas in America is $3.39 — down from over $5 when I took office.”
“Biden was basically correct on the ‘most common price’ at the time he made this comment but appears to have misspoken about the price when he took office,” Kessler wrote.
A third claim from the president came on Nov. 1, when he declared, “On my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks.”
“The problem? The reason Social Security payments are going up is because Social Security benefits, under a law passed in 1972, are adjusted every year to keep pace with inflation,” the article stated. “Next year, benefits will increase 8.7 percent — but that’s because inflation has soared at that level. Biden and the Federal Reserve have been trying to fight inflation, but without much success so far.”
The final claim was Biden’s assertion that he got his student loan cancellation plan “passed by a vote or two.”
“In describing his plan for student loan forgiveness, Biden oddly said he had ‘just signed a law’ that was approved in Congress by ‘a vote or two.’ But he never presented such a proposal for Congress to consider,” Kessler wrote.
He added, “Instead, Biden relied on new authority granted by the Justice Department — a fresh interpretation of a law passed almost two decades ago, the 2003 Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, often dubbed the Heroes Act.”
While the White House claimed the president was referring to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, Kessler pointed out that the bill did not involve student loan cancellation.
“And analysts have said that whatever deficit reduction is achieved by the law will be quickly exceeded by the cost of the student loan program, if it survives legal challenges,” he added.
