JOE BIDEN’S ENDURING DECEPTIONS

JOE BIDEN’S ENDURING DECEPTIONS.

As far as the press are concerned, Joe Biden has been the least accessible president in memory. There’s a reason for that. It’s been clear for a long time that the 82-year-old Biden is not mentally and physically up to the job. After it became politically safe for Democratic-supporting media outlets to report his infirmities — that was after his disastrous June 27, 2024, debate performance against President-elect Donald Trump — we learned that Biden’s staff went to great lengths to keep him away from the press. For whatever reason, many reporters happily steered clear of questioning the president’s condition.

An outgoing president often conducts final interviews with media outlets. Biden chose to do just one, with USA Today’s Susan Page. And three embarrassing blunders — or were they deceptions, or self-deceptions? — show why Biden’s aides have kept him away from interviews for so long.

First was Biden’s insistence that inflation was raging at 9% when he took office, when, in fact, inflation was a quite low 1.4% in January 2021. Biden first made the claim last May, when he was still in the campaign against Trump, telling CNN, “No president has had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office. Nine percent.” Even though a bunch of media fact-checkers pointed out the error, Biden repeated it a week later.

Now, in the USA Today interview, Biden has done it again, although in somewhat garbled form. He was asked whether “you think you paid too little attention early on to the warning about inflation with the American Rescue Plan,” the giant $1.9 trillion stimulus he signed into law on March 11, 2021, “or failed to recognize soon enough how much this was affecting so many Americans’ lives?”

“I knew how much inflation was affecting their lives, but none of this had passed when inflation was at 9%,” Biden answered. It is totally unclear what he meant by that. Inflation, low when he took office, did not hit its peak, 9.1%, until July 2022, when Biden had been in office a year and a half. Biden then went on to brag that his policies did not result in a recession, as many had predicted. “The fact is that we had a soft landing, no recession, and the interest rate was 9% when we came into office in the beginning. It was down to 2.34% now.”

In the context of his entire statement, it appears that by “interest rate,” Biden meant “inflation rate.” So he seems to have again claimed that it was 9% when he took office. Perhaps Biden actually believes this, which could suggest that he does not have a firm grasp of what took place with inflation during his presidency.

The second blunder concerned Biden’s son, Hunter, who has pleaded guilty to tax charges, among other things. In the USA Today interview, Biden defended his decision to pardon his son, even after promising earlier that he would never do such a thing. Biden told Page that he changed his mind about pardoning Hunter because “I found out two factors. No. 1, that he had paid all his taxes. He paid them late. … He paid all his taxes. He paid the back taxes. He was late.”

The problem with that is that Hunter Biden did not pay his back taxes — a wealthy Hollywood lawyer and Joe Biden supporter paid his back taxes. Kevin Morris, sometimes referred to as Hunter Biden’s “sugar brother,” has acknowledged loaning him $6.5 million, millions of which went to paying his back taxes and penalties. As of the most recent reports, Hunter Biden has not repaid Morris.

The third blunder was Biden’s belief that he would have won reelection had he remained on the presidential ballot last year. “Do you believe you could have won in November?” Page asked. “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes, based on the polling,” Biden answered.

Election observers of all stripes immediately flipped out. “I categorize Biden’s statement that he could have beaten Trump as flat-out bonkers,” CNN’s Harry Enten posted. “Biden was well behind Trump when he dropped out. Biden never led in all of 2024. And no incumbent president who was anywhere near as unpopular as Biden has ever won.”

It’s hard to argue with that. And it is safe to say that there was no chance in the world that Biden would defeat Trump had he stayed in the race. But the president can believe what he wants to believe, and at this point, there appears to be no convincing him otherwise.