A Whopper Of A Debate: Biden Bombs On Fact Checks
By George Rasley
Let’s start with the obvious: Biden is not a well man, his voice, slurring his speech and the vacant look in his eyes betrayed the same things I see when I visit family members in memory care. However, our job tonight was to follow up on what Breitbart posted at one point, “It’s almost impossible to keep up with Biden’s lies–he’s on quite a roll and it’s very difficult to understand his mumbling and rambling–but this is a heck of a whopper from a few minutes ago…” so we’ve done our best to pick a few key issues and document Biden’s lies.
Fact Check On The Biden Economy
Even CNN admitted Biden’s oft repeated claim that the inflation rate was 9% when he became president is not close to true. The year-over-year inflation rate in January 2021, the month of his inauguration, was about 1.4%. The Biden-era inflation rate did peak at about 9.1% – but that peak occurred in June 2022, after Biden had been president for more than 16 months. The March 2024 inflation rate, the most recent available rate at the time Biden made these comments, was about 3.5%, up from about 3.2% the month prior.
When Biden took office, the nationwide average price of gasoline was $2.39 per gallon. Gas prices would hit over $5—in 2022 under BIDEN when all 50 states recorded RECORD-HIGH gas prices.
Bidenflation outpaced wages for a majority of Biden’s presidency – both year-over-year real average hourly earnings and real average weekly earnings were negative for 25 months.
What’s more, real wages remain lower than when Biden first took office. Inflation-adjusted average weekly earnings were $397.90 when Biden took office and are now $380.56 – the BLS adjusts to 1982-1984 dollars – meaning Americans have seen a 4.4 percent pay cut under Biden. Under President Trump, real average weekly wages rose 8.2 percent.
The U.S. national debt has increased over $7 trillion since Biden took office, according to Biden’s own Treasury Department.
The first question was on the economy, Tapper asks Biden how he answers those who point out a basket of groceries that cost $100 now cost $120. Biden blames Trump for the economic failures of his administration, but more interestingly Biden seems to be losing his voice and keeps coughing and his voice sounds faint.
Trump begins his answer by noting that “we had the greatest economic in the history of the world,” and Trump lays out how he got the country “out of the COVID mess.” Trump sounds like he’s in command.
“Inflation is killing our country,” Trump said.
Biden, in rebuttal, argues that only Trump thinks the economy was the greatest in the history of the world under Trump.
Later in the debate Biden in his answer told a blatant lie, which was he claimed unemployment was 50 percent when he took office. It was around 6 percent, actually.
Fact Check On Immigration
When asked questions about the border and illegal immigration Trump torched Biden’s open borders policies “that are hurting women because rapes and murders by illegal aliens are happening.” Biden keeps fumbling his answers and losing his train of thought mid-sentence while mumbling badly.
The border has never been secure under Joe Biden, said Trump. In fact, the floodgates opened almost immediately after Biden took office. Biden took 94 executive actions in his first 100 days to dismantle President Trump’s successful border security — then implemented a catch-and-release scheme that resettled millions of unvetted illegal aliens in U.S. communities.
Now, suspected terrorists are flooding across in record numbers as at least ten million illegals, tons and tons of fentanyl, and criminals from all over the world cross into the country — and American citizens are raped and murdered by illegals with no right to be here.
Biden later celebrated the millions of “illegal aliens”–yes he used that word–he let into America, and then tried to argue it’s GOOD for the economy.
Fact Check On Ukraine
The question posed by the moderator was, “Are Putin’s terms for ending the war acceptable?”
Biden answered by looking down and mumbling through his next answer and not clearly articulating anything. Biden just keeps throwing out words that did not make much sense.
Eventually Bash cut Biden off with “thank you” and ends the painful commentary from the sitting president. She turns back to Trump and asks if he thinks Putin’s views are acceptable and he says they are not.
Trump then ripped through a long list of Biden failures including the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan surrendering $85 billion in military equipment to the Taliban and led to the tragic deaths of 13 U.S. service members. He concluded by saying if he had been President Russia would have never attacked and that he was going to settle the war when elected.
Fact Check On January 6
Biden’s response on January 6 was completely unintelligible, then Trump then hit Biden on how he ought to be “ashamed of yourself” for ruining many people’s lives who were at the protest.
Biden’s rebuttal was to criticize Trump for calling the January 6 protestors “patriots” and to repeat the lie that “statues were overturned” and offices were destroyed. Biden then attacked the tens of millions of people nationwide who will vote for Trump, saying they will be voting against democracy. Then rambles through a warped version of the Charlottesville hoax again Trump said Nazis were fine people.
The left-leaning fact-checking website Snopes acknowledged Saturday that former President Trump never called neo-Nazis “very fine people” during his press conference following the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017.
“While Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and White supremacists and said they should be ‘condemned totally.’ Therefore, we have rated this claim ‘False,'” Snopes wrote.
Fact Check On Minority Economic Progress
Back from the first commercial break, Biden struggled through an answer on what he did for the black community. Biden’s rambling and nonsensical answers were hard to understand.
The Trump economy lifted median Black household incomes to their highest levels on record and pushed Black unemployment rates and poverty rates down to their lowest levels, then there is really just one choice, said Trump.
Trump then ripped Biden for hurting the black community with his inflationary economic policies and his immigration policies leading to migrants taking jobs from black and Hispanic Americans.
Fact Check On Fentanyl
While Biden claimed that fentanyl importation is down the New York Post reported Joe Biden’s border crisis is deadly enough to kill every American, literally — as proven by the 386 million doses of fentanyl seized by the DEA in 2023.
Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans between 18 and 45.
The 12 months ending in April 2023 saw more than 111,355 overdose deaths among Americans — even higher than the already record-breaking 110,394 the year before.
At an average of 22 deaths per week, the death rate for teen drug ODs in 2022 more than doubled the rate in 2018, another grim figure driven by the synthetic opioid.
U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) discussed how the Biden administration’s open-border agenda is escalating the fentanyl crisis across the country. “Since President Biden took office, nearly 10 million illegal immigrants have flooded into our nation. And Senator Grassley touched on this a little earlier today: 77,000 pounds of fentanyl have been confiscated at the border over that time. You don’t know how much got through, but you can imagine just based on the statistics and the deaths, the number is high.
“Whether it’s from China or Mexico, the transnational criminal networks that are producing, transporting, and marketing these drugs are poisoning our country… Until we secure the border and protect Americans, we’re not going to be able to get to the bottom of the fentanyl problem.”
At the conclusion of the debate the Trump campaign issued a statement, which said in part:
Joe Biden on the other hand showed exactly why he deserves to be fired. Despite taking a week-long vacation at Camp David to prepare for the debate, Biden was unable to defend his disastrous record on the economy and the border. Throughout the debate Biden lied, invented stories, and could not articulate a single plan to make things less expensive and keep our people safe, choosing instead to change the subject and dwell on the past. Even worse, Biden couldn’t explain why he took a week of vacation at Camp David while 50 ISIS terrorists ran loose in our country. President Trump is spot-on when he says that if Joe Biden is too incompetent to stand trial, then Biden is too incompetent to be President.
We couldn’t agree more.
George Rasley is editor of Conservative HQ.
Published with permission of conservativehq.com