President Joe Biden has spent his career claiming achievements not his own and spinning yarns, tanking his 1988 presidential campaign, for instance, both with lies about easily disproven academic achievements and by plagiarizing a speech nearly verbatim — with accompanying autobiographic details and Welsh syntax — from a British politician.
Owing to the decrepitude that spiked his 2024 presidential campaign, the 82-year-old Democrat has found it increasingly difficult in recent years to knit convincing claims — such as when he pushed the unsubstantiated “suckers” and “losers” smear against President-elect Donald Trump; pushed the false “very fine people” hoax in his often-told presidential origin story; speaking of his uncle’s supposed consumption by New Guinea cannibals; detailing his meeting with a then-dead Amtrak conductor; and claiming he was at Ground Zero in New York City the day after 9/11.
While losing his touch, Biden tried his apparent best Wednesday night in his 17-minute farewell address from the Oval Office to the nation to remain consistent, pushing easily unraveled half-truths and other questionable claims about his supposed accomplishments, then bemoaning the demise of the fact-check regime that aided him in 2020.
The great liberator
At the outset, Biden, who proved unable to seal the deal over the previous 15 months, claimed responsibility for the ceasefire and hostage deal reached this week between Israel and Hamas without once mentioning the major role played by Trump.
‘The involvement of President-elect Trump’s team has been absolutely critical.’
Jonathan Panikoff, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, told the Associated Press that Trump’s threats against the terrorists and efforts to lean on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu through his incoming Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff proved consequential.
“Both the outgoing and incoming administration deserve credit for this deal, and it would’ve been far less likely to happen without both pushing for it,” said Panikoff.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said, “The involvement of President-elect Trump’s team has been absolutely critical in getting this deal over the line.”
Netanyahu reportedly thanked Trump personally for “helping bring an end to the suffering of dozens of hostages and their families.”
The great unifier
Biden stated in his speech that he kept his “commitment to be president for all Americans, through one of the toughest periods in our nation’s history.”
While technically president for all Americans, Biden routinely attacked and dehumanized those who did not support him, characterizing tens of millions of Trump supporters as “garbage”; suggesting House Republicans were worse than his old segregationist buddies; and stating that his political opponents not only “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” but threaten “the brick and mortar of our democratic institutions.”
Biden’s Department of Justice held Trump allies to a different standard from their fellow travelers; disproportionately targeted pro-lifers while actively advancing radicals’ abortion agenda; and treated concerned parents and traditional Christians out of line with the administration’s thinking as potential threats.
Biden’s State Department and other elements of his administration undertook efforts to both directly and indirectly suppress dissenting voices and critics, particularly on the right. Various departments and agencies during his tenure were, for instance, credibly accused — as they were in the New Civil Liberties Alliance’s amended September complaint in the case Dressen, et al. v. Flaherty, et al. filed on behalf of five individuals who suffered vaccine-related injuries — of working to “coerce, induce, and collude with social media platforms to censor, suppress, and label as ‘misinformation’ speech expressed by those who have suffered vaccine-related injuries.”
Biden, in another apparent exception to his commitment to be a president for all, pushed through his Department of Education’s woke new Title IX rules depriving women of safe, sex-segregated spaces in schools, including bathrooms and changing rooms, revealing that young women, as a cohort, were apparently a lesser priority than gender ideologues and transvestite activists.
The great enforcer
Biden recycled the shaky claim in his speech that he brought violent crime to a 50-year low. The 82-year-old Democratic has said this on many occasions, relying on FBI statistics in which “violent crime” accounts for murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
There are number of issues with Biden’s reliance on FBI data. For starters, nearly one-third of law enforcement agencies have neglected to submit crime data to the FBI in recent years. In 2022, for instance, crime-ridden cities like Phoenix, New York City, and Los Angeles failed to submit crime data.
This problem of unreliability is compounded by the FBI’s apparent willingness to fudge the numbers. The Crime Prevention Research Center reported in October that the FBI stealthily changed its crime data for 2022. Whereas previously the bureau claimed violent crime fell by 2.1% that year, it adjusted the statistics to indicate that violent crime actually jumped by at least 4.5%.
‘We have launched a new era of American possibilities.’
Other measures of crime have also cast doubt on the veracity of Biden’s talking point. John Lott Jr., president of the CPRC, told Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck in September, “There are two measures that we have of crime, and the media just seems to only be looking at one of these measures and not realizing what it’s measuring.”
“So the two measures are the FBI’s measure of crimes reported to police,” continued Lott. “And then there’s the Bureau of Justice Statistics measure, called the National Crime Victimization data, which gets a measure of total crime, both reported and unreported. Prior to 2020, these two sets of numbers generally went up and down together. But since 2020, they have been going at opposite directions.”
Lott noted that whereas the FBI originally claimed violent crime dipped by over 2% in 2022, the National Crime Victimization Survey showed a massive spike in the violent victimization rate.
The great connector
Just as Biden likely did not oversee a precipitous drop in crime, he also didn’t bring multitudes of Americans online, as he suggested in his speech.
Biden insinuated that his administration had something to do with delivering internet to the masses, stating, “We have launched a new era of American possibilities: one of the greatest modernizations of infrastructure in our entire history, from new roads, bridges, clean water, affordable high-speed internet for every American.”
Biden appears to have been referring to his $42.5 billion scheme to expand broadband internet to bring internet access to roughly 25 million people, which turned out to be a complete dud — perhaps more useless than his promised electric vehicle charging station network.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ratified by Biden in 2021 included a provision for billions to be blown on the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program.
Brendan Carr, a Republican commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, noted on June 14, “In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans. Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest.”
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