Sunday, 17 November 2024

Fact Check: Joe Biden, 81, (Again) Claims He ‘Used to Drive an 18-Wheeler’


Fact Check: Joe Biden, 81, (Again) Claims He ‘Used to Drive an 18-Wheeler’
TOPSHOT - US President Joe Biden drives the new electric Ford F-150 Lightning at the FordNICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images

CLAIM: President Joe Biden recently aired his oft-repeated claim he “used to Drive an 18-wheeler.”

VERDICT: False.

“Biden’s claim remains untrue. There is no evidence he ever drove an 18-wheeler,” CNN reported Wednesday:

Biden has repeatedly embellished or invented biographical tidbits. In 2021, he claimed during a tour of a Mack Trucks facility: “I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man,” then added, “I got to.” At a separate 2021 event, he told college students studying truck technology, “I used to drive a tractor-trailer,” adding, “I only did it for part of a summer, but I got my license anyway.”

Biden’s claims were fact-checked at the time as false. But on Tuesday, during a campaign event in Florida, Biden said it again.

When CNN inquired about the claim in 2021, the White House noted that Biden once had a part-time job driving a school bus (which is not an 18-wheeler or a tractor-trailer) and that, as a US senator in 1973, he spent a night riding in a cargo truck (not driving it).

It is Biden's second time in two weeks that he suggested a false idea, after first airing the truck  story in 2021, as Breitbart News reported.

While traveling to a campaign stop last week, Biden told a story about his uncle, Ambrose J. Finnegan, whose Air Force plane was “shot down” during a “reconnaissance flight over New Guinea” during World War II.

His uncle, however, was a passenger on an Army Air Forces plane that he ditched “for unknown reasons” in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of New Guinea, according to the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Biden, whom special counsel Robert Hur characterized as “an elderly man with a poor memory,” often struggles to communicate.

  • About one-third of Democrats doubt Biden’s mental fitness, a Harvard/Harris survey recently found.
  • Another poll revealed 82 percent of Americans harbor concerns about his physical and mental health.
  • Only about one-quarter of voters say Biden is physically or mentally fit to serve a second term, Quinnipiac found.
  • Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.


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