Washington Post Fact Checker Tallies How Many False Claims Biden Made in First 100 Days
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President Joe Biden has made 67 false and misleading claims in his first 100 days in office, according to a report Monday by the Washington Post’s Fact Checker.
That’s considerably less than the 511 false or misleading claims former President Donald Trump made in his first 100 days, according to the Post.
The Post said that Biden’s most “notable falsehoods” include a statement, which Biden repeated multiple times, that Georgia’s controversial election law shortened voting hours. This, along with a statement from Biden that federal contracts “awarded directly to foreign companies” rose by 30% under Trump, earned the Fact Checker’s “Four Pinocchio” rating, which is “reserved for whoppers,” according to the report.
About one-seventh of Biden’s false or misleading claims relate to the new Georgia election law, the report said. Others included statements about his infrastructure plan creating “19 million jobs” (a Moody analysis put that number at 2.7 million), claiming that children in Mexico “starved to death” under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, erroneously saying more Americans have died from the coronavirus than from all of World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War, and statements about the vaccine rollout.
In what the Post called perhaps Biden’s “strangest claim,” he said that he had “traveled 17,000 miles” with Chinese president Xi Jinping. The White House has since conceded that this was not accurate, and how Biden got to that number “remains a mystery,” the Post report said.
The Post also said that the Biden era “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,” adding that it was more typical for Biden to engage in “subtle truth stretching” rather than outright false statements.
The report partly attributes Biden’s “relatively limited number of falsehoods” to the fact that Biden usually gives prepared statements that have been vetted. He also “devotes little time to social media, in contrast to his Twitter-obsessed predecessor, and rarely faces reporters or speaks off the cuff.”
The report added that Biden often “recalibrated” his wording in response to news coverage.
