Since Joe Biden has been in the White House, his communications team has found itself hard at work correcting the record almost every time he delivers a public address. A notable feature of his time in office has been the altering of White House transcripts of his speeches, interviews, and remarks to reporters. How many times has he stumbled verbally, only to have the official record of what he said corrected? The Daily Caller recently decided to investigate and found that, just since the beginning of 2024, official transcripts have been changed well over 100 times.
To be fair and accurate, it’s worth noting that the folks at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. haven’t attempted to make it appear that these numerous and occasionally hilarious verbal gaffes never happened. One can peruse the transcripts on the White House website and see that Biden’s words have been accurately documented, along with corrections.
The Many Corrected Gaffes of Joe Biden
It’s quite an indictment of a man who portrays himself as perhaps the greatest and most competent president in history that in the span of just four months, Biden’s own staff has been forced to set the record straight at least 148 times. The Daily Caller notes that transcripts of former President Donald Trump’s public remarks required relatively few alterations.
During his last State of the Union address in March of 2024, when Mr. Biden told Congress that “The threat to democracy must be defended,” the official record is corrected in this way: “The threat to democracy must be defended [defeated].” Still, one might argue that it was a bit of a Freudian slip.
When he observed in January of this year that, “Today, 720 270 million Americans have gotten COVID vaccine,” the record was duly set straight. The number was struck through and the correct number – 270 – inserted after it.
In April, Joe Biden went to Pittsburgh, PA, to cozy up to the steel workers and criticized those who claim China is on the rise while America is in decline. “I’ve always believed we’ve got it all wrong,” he said – and he was almost certainly correct. But here’s the official transcript: “I’ve always believed we’ve [they’ve] got it all wrong. America is rising. And we have the best economy in the world, which we do.”
For some unknown reason, Biden’s communications people didn’t correct the obvious gaffe about the best economy in the world – and that brings up a whole new issue; when are they going to start issuing corrections to our illustrious commander-in-chief’s fantasies and tall tales?
Storyteller-in-Chief
Aside from all these corrected transcripts, Joe Biden, since coming to power, has either inferred or directly claimed a staggering number of things that are easily debunked. Even some of the most prominent left-leaning news outlets have listed his falsehoods and fabrications. Just one of many examples being an October 2022 article from The New York Times titled, “Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel.”
The article notes that, more than once in recent years, Joe Biden has claimed that he almost lost his house in a fire – though another version of the story involves a lightning strike. In reality, there was a small kitchen fire that was easily brought under control. The paper noted that Biden has also falsely asserted that he was an “award-winning” student who earned three degrees and that he once said he was raised in the Puerto Rican community.
He used to drive an 18-wheeler. He spent four years as a university lecturer. He used to commute by train across the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, MD, despite it not being a rail bridge. And his son, the late Beau Biden, died in Iraq. These are just a few more examples – but are they outright lies, memory lapses, or confusion? Everyone can judge for themselves, but none of these things are true. And wait, there’s more – especially if one goes back further than his ascension to the Oval Office.
He claimed in 2007 that he was “shot at” in Iraq. In 1993 he said he called former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic a “damn war criminal” to his face. No one else present when the two men met recalls such a remark. The list of nonsense and shaggy dog stories goes on and on – and it seems that more are being added on an almost daily basis. He truly is a legend in his own lunchtime.
There are outrageous claims about Biden’s role in the civil rights movement. He is on record, as a US senator, speaking out in opposition to desegregation – saying that he feared his children would grow up in a “racial jungle.” Throughout his political career, he has been known for making numerous casually racist remarks. Yet these days he has the audacity to repeatedly claim that he used to get arrested at civil rights marches.
Even more egregious, he recently painted himself as a pioneer of the movement. Speaking in January at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, Joe Biden told the black congregation:
“I’ve spent more time in the Bethel AME church in Wilmington, Delaware, than I have – than most people I know, black or white, have spent in that church. Because that’s where I started the – no, I’m serious – I started a civil rights movement…”
Correcting Biden’s almost innumerable gaffes is all well and good, but there seems to be no cure for his inability to resist the urge to embellish, exaggerate, and, quite often, blatantly fictionalize his own life experience. Trump is given to hyperbole, and it’s hardly a little-known fact that at times he has a tendency to stretch the truth – as most politicians do. Joe Biden, though, is in a class all by himself – unless we’re counting science fiction novelists.
