As President Joe Biden’s 100th day in office nears, The Washington Post’s fact checker is tallying the amount of false or misleading claims he has made in that time frame.
On Monday, the Post released a tally of Biden’s misleading claims after “four years of a presidency that swamped Americans with a gusher of false and misleading claims.”
In contrast to former President Donald Trump, the Post said Biden “has offered a return to a more typical pattern when it comes to a commander in chief and his relationship with the facts — one that features frequent spin and obfuscation or exaggeration, with the occasional canard.”
In total, the Post said the new president has made 67 false or misleading statements since Jan. 20. In 2017, the Post reported that Trump had made 511 false or misleading statements in his first 100 days.
“Among the most notable falsehoods of President Biden’s first 100 days in office was his claim — which he made three times — that Georgia’s controversial Republican-backed election law had shortened voting hours,” the Post said.
In March, Biden claimed that a controversial new voting law in Georgia shortened voting hours. However, the Post’s fact checker slapped him with “four Pinocchios” as it noted that “experts say the net effect of the new early-voting rules was to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them.”
About one-seventh of Biden’s claims were about Georgia’s voting law.
Some of the other statements counted by the Post include his claim that his infrastructure bill would create 19 million jobs, “While the analysis, by Moody’s Analytics, did make that prediction, it attributed only 2.7 million of those additional jobs to the plan itself; most of the other jobs would have been created anyway, with or without the plan.”
He also claimed that migrants children “children ‘starved to death’ in Mexico under Trump’s 2019 policy allowing border officers to return non-Mexican asylum seekers to locations in Mexico as their claims are adjudicated in immigration courts.”
And the Post pointed to what it said was Biden’s “strangest claim.”:
“Perhaps the strangest claim made by Biden — which he said twice as president — was that he had ‘traveled 17,000 miles with’ Chinese president Xi Jinping when they were both vice presidents. Biden certainly met with him a lot — but the White House conceded that ‘traveled with’ was not accurate. Moreover, no matter how generously the travel was measured, it never added up to 17,000 miles. How Biden made this calculation — which he also said at least once during the campaign — remains a mystery.”
The Post found that Biden made 21 false or misleading statements in remarks, 17 in interviews, 16 in news conferences, nine in prepared speeches, three in an “other” category, and one in a tweet.
“Biden’s relatively limited number of falsehoods is a function, at least in part, of the fact that his public appearances consist mostly of prepared texts vetted by his staff. He devotes little time to social media, in contrast to his Twitter-obsessed predecessor, and rarely faces reporters or speaks off the cuff,” the paper suggested.
