The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler on Monday gave President Joe Biden a “bottomless Pinocchio” as part of a roundup of the president’s falsehoods.
Kessler said he decided to do a roundup of Biden’s misleading or false claims because “readers have asked for fact checks of a variety of recent Biden statements, but none of them seemed big enough for a stand-alone fact check.”
“We generally do not award Pinocchios for roundups like this — but for reasons that will become clear, we need to make an exception for the first one,” Kessler wrote.
New #FactChecker –> A Bottomless Pinocchio for Biden — and other recent gaffes https://t.co/aX6n1epKsI
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) November 7, 2022
Kessler first fact checked a recent claim Biden made in which he said he has spent “more time with Xi Jinping than any other head of state” and has “traveled 17,000 miles with him.” Kessler noted that the Post rated the claim false shortly after Biden took office and that the White House “could not offer an explanation for that number either.”
“But it’s noteworthy because, despite our fact check and a White House admission that Biden’s line of ‘traveling with’ Xi was not accurate,” Biden nonetheless repeated the comment multiple times, Kessler wrote. (RELATED: Ron Klain Says Biden Speech Was ‘One Final Warning’)
Kessler explained that a claim would be considered a “Bottomless Pinocchio” if “it had earned a Three or Four Pinocchios rating and been repeated at least 20 times.” According to the Post’s Fact Checker, three-Pinocchio statements are “mostly false,” while four-Pinocchio claims are “[w]hoppers.”
Kessler noted that this Bottomless Pinocchio is Biden’s first. Former President Donald Trump had racked up 56 Bottomless Pinocchios by the time he left office.
The fact check then touched on Biden’s false claim that gas was $5 when he took office, as well as his recent statement that seniors “are getting an increase in their Social Security checks.” Kessler pointed out that seniors are seeing larger checks because high inflation triggered a higher-than-usual cost-of-living increase. These annual adjustments have taken place automatically since the Nixon administration. The White House later deleted the tweet making the claim.
Biden’s recent claim that he passed student debt forgiveness “by a vote or two” was also fact checked as false. “He never presented such a proposal for Congress to consider,” Kessler wrote.
