by Steven Richards
Fresh off a poor first-debate performance, President Joe Biden and his campaign sought to paint GOP rival Donald Trump as a liar for his claims during the June debate. However, the president made several untrue claims of his own since the June 27 appearance.
For example, as public scrutiny ramped up on Biden’s mental capacity in light of his halting debate performance, the president claimed that he had been transparent with his medical records. During the debate, Biden appeared disoriented and struggled to find the right words to use at the right time, Just the News reported, which raised questions in the media and the general public about his fitness for office.
“By the way, in terms of my neurological capacity, I had a physical, a neurological physical as well, in February. It’s released. I released all my records. All of them. And I have a neurological test every day,” Biden said during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday.
Yet Biden has never released his full medical records, only letters from his physician, Kevin O’Connor, the Washington Post reported. Under pressure, the White House released a letter this week from O’Connor that says Biden has been examined by a neurologist during each of his annual physicals.
Biden again misspoke after it was reported that Virginia Sen. Mark Warner was trying to form a group of fellow Senate Democrats to ask Biden, also a Democrat, to drop out of the presidential race.
When asked about the effort during an interview days after the debate with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Biden said: “Well, Mark [Warner] is a good man. We’ve never had – he also tried to get the nomination too.”
Warner never ran for the Democratic nomination, though he considered it in 2008.
In that same interview with ABC News, Biden claimed that he gained a point in the polls after the debate.
“The New York Times had me down 10 points before the debate, nine now, or whatever the hell it is,” he said.
In fact, the Times’ post-debate poll showed that Biden polled three points worse against his opponent following the debate and he was not originally “down 10 points,” but only down by three points originally – the gap widening to six.
Biden also made several untrue claims on debate night even as his political team tried to paint Trump as the liar on stage.
Immediately after the debate, Biden called Trump “just a liar” and said that “what’s going to happen over the next couple of days is they will be out there fact-checking all the things he said.”
But, Biden delivered his own whoppers during the sparring match with his GOP rival.
For example, while Biden was explaining why he chose to run for president in 2020, he repeated the debunked claim that his opponent Trump called neo-Nazi and white nationalist attendees at the infamous Charlottesville rally “very fine people.”
“I said I wasn’t going to run again until I saw what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. People coming out of the woods carrying swastikas on torture and and singing the same antisemitic bile they sang when back in Germany,” he said at the debate. “They asked [Trump], they said, ‘What? What do you think of those people’… He said, ‘I think there’s fine people on both sides.'”
Yet left-wing fact-checker Snopes had corrected that longstanding claim just days before the debate.
“Trump did say there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ referring to the protesters and the counter-protesters. He said in the same statement he wasn’t talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be ‘condemned totally,'” the fact-checker said.
Also during the debate, when comparing his foreign policy record to Trump’s, Biden claimed that no U.S. service members had died anywhere in the world during his tenure.
“And the military, you know, when he was president, they were still killing people in Afghanistan,” Biden said. “He didn’t do anything about that. When he was president, we were still – find ourselves in where you had a notion that we were this safe country.”
“The truth is, I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any this decade, any troops dying anywhere in the world like he did.”
However, 13 U.S. troops died in the suicide bombing of Abbey Gate at the Kabul airport during the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan in August 2021. Additionally, three American soldiers were killed in January in a drone strike in the Middle Eastern country of Jordan.
Addressing the issue of immigration, Biden proudly asserted that “the border patrolmen endorsed me, endorsed my position.” Yet, there is no evidence that President Biden was endorsed by the group.
“To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden,” the National Border Patrol Council said after the debate. However, Biden may have been referring to the group’s support for the bipartisan immigration deal that failed to pass earlier this year.
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Steven Richards is a reporter for Just the News.
