What it's been like fact-checking Joe Biden through 100 days - CNN Politics - 0 views
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Things have been quieter around here in presidential-fact-check land. Not because President Joe Biden is accurate all the time. He certainly isn’t. But through his first 100 days in the Oval Office, Biden has given us intermittent false claims rather than the staggering avalanche of daily wrongness we faced from his predecessor.
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Biden has made 29 total false claims in his first 100 days, about one every three-and-a-half days on average. That’s not cause for celebration. But I counted 214 false claims from Trump over his own first 100 days in office, more than two per day on average – and that was a very slow Trump period compared to what came later.
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When Biden does make public remarks, he is much more likely to be reading from a prepared text than the famously freewheeling Trump was. Biden’s prepared texts have been quite factual.
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Trump used the social media service to deliver off-the-cuff and oft-inaccurate boasts and attacks. Biden prefers to post conventionally presidential messages, a large number of which do not contain checkable claims of any kind.
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Biden claimed that the majority of undocumented immigrants in the US are not Hispanic (experts put the actual figure at two-thirds or more Hispanic), that China has more retired people than working people (it has hundreds of millions more working people than retired people), that community health centers would be sent one million Covid-19 vaccine doses a week (the plan was to send one million in the “initial phase” of the program, not every week), and that the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage would be $20 per hour today if it had been linked to inflation upon its creation (Biden was not even close – the White House said Biden got mixed up with another statistic).
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Biden claimed the US was sending back “the vast majority of families” who arrived at the southern border. While the US was indeed expelling the majority of all migrants encountered at the border, it was sending back less than half of the families in particular.
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In late March and early April, Biden weighed in on the hot-button issue of the new Georgia elections law. And he either deceived or didn’t have his facts straight – wrongly suggesting that the law requires polling places to close at 5 p.m. (You can read a detailed fact check here.) While the new law does reduce voter access in other ways, Biden gave the law’s supporters ammunition to argue that the law’s opponents were being dishonest.
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Biden’s push for additional gun control measures, he exaggerated about gun manufacturers’ immunity from lawsuits
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And Biden has repeatedly claimed that Trump signed a tax law that gave 83% of the benefits to the top 1%. In reality, that 83% figure is a think tank’s estimate for what would happen in 2027 if the law’s corporate tax cuts remained in place but its individual tax cuts expired as scheduled after 2025. Between 2018 and 2025, conversely, the think tank estimated that the top 1% would get between 20.5% and 25.3% of the benefits.
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Boasting of how well he knows Chinese President Xi Jinping, Biden claimed three times in office that he has traveled 17,000 miles or more than 17,000 miles “with” Xi. As the Washington Post first noted, that number is nowhere close to accurate. Biden could have accurately made the same point by saying he has spent a lot of time with Xi.
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In an impassioned flourish at the CNN town hall in February, Biden claimed the US spends almost $9 billion on a tax break “for people who own racehorses.” Experts have no idea where Biden got that figure for this tax break, and the White House declined to explain.
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In my first fact check of Biden’s presidency, in January, I noted Biden was wrong when he told reporters that when he initially announced his goal of 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days, “you all said it’s not possible.” Biden switched to softer, accurate language in subsequent comments on the subject – saying in March, for example, that his goal was initially “considered ambitious” and that “some even suggested it was somewhat audacious.”
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We aren’t throwing a party for the Biden team here; it would have been better if the administration hadn’t gotten it wrong in the first place. But after four years dealing with a Trump White House that appeared not to care about fact-checking at all, the Biden White House’s response was a welcome development.