I was struck by the number of dubious statements and flat-out lies at the DNC.
It appears the mainstream media isn’t much interested in them, amid their jubilant, joy-full coverage. So I decided to do some fact-checking, focused on Biden’s speech.
There’s a lot. ⤵️
1. The first thing that jumped out to me was Trump’s alleged “very fine people on both sides” description of Charlottesville.
Haven’t we been over this, time and again? The context makes clear Trump didn’t mean the neo-Nazis. Even @snopes admitted it!
Yet Biden trotted it out.
2. Biden claimed he and his admin “demonizes no one.”
What, then, about Biden’s remarks about Trump supporters? That they are “determined to destroy democracy,” practitioners of “semi-fascism,” and “a threat to the very soul of this nation.”
Is that not demonizing?
3. Biden said he rebuilt “the middle class.”
He should take that claim up with the middle class, who aren’t exactly thrilled about Bidenomics and its corresponding inflation.
4. One quote really stopped me cold. Biden said he had created “60 million new jobs.”
Even assuming (charitably) that he meant 16, his numbers are off by a couple million after the Labor Dept corrected their numbers.
And those figures are dubious, @zhalaschak explains:
5. Biden claimed inflation was “down, way down.”
Put simply, this is a bald-faced lie. Inflation may be down since the 40-year record Biden increase it to. But it’s still higher than when Trump left office.
6. Biden claimed seniors would go from paying “$400 a month” for insulin down to $35 a month.
His first number is how much seniors currently pay *per year.* But saying “they’ll save a couple bucks” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
The @nytimes said the claim “needs context”
6. Cont. Apparently that “context” was just “the actual numbers” which Biden had instead made up.
What are we doing here, guys?
This was one of only 5 Biden claims the Times deigned to revisit.
Needless to say, I’ve got more.
7. Biden claimed he was providing high speed internet for everyone, no matter where they lived.
He isn’t. One in five Americans still lack reliable internet access. Promising to do something—it should go without saying—doesn’t mean doing it.
8. Biden said the U.S. is “cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030.”
Again, you can’t simply say something and have that declaration make it true.
The U.S. is meaningfully off-track from Biden’s goal, before accounting for uptick of EVs and renewable energy lagging.
9. Speaking of EVs, Biden said the U.S. is “installing 500,000 charging stations.”
After 2 years and $7 billion, you know how many are operational?
7. Not 700. Or 7,000.
7. Total.
Again, saying you’re going to do something doesn’t mean it’s done. (H/t @washingtonpost)
10. Biden said his admin “kept our commitment” on student loan debt relief.
Perhaps he forgot what he had promised as a candidate, but the internet is forever. He said he’d deliver $10,000 in debt relief.
That didn’t survive contact with the Constitution.
11. Biden said “I’m so damn old.”
My review of the evidence found that to be true.
12. Biden said Americans “are safer today than under Donald Trump.”
But the U.S. and our allies are involved in more conflicts than ever, as war rages in the Middle East and in Europe. I wrote about this back in February for @FreeBeacon
13. Biden called Trump a “convicted felon.”
Seriously? The President of the United States took the stage to undermine the presumption of innocence for his party’s opponent. Trump, of course, isn’t a convicted anything.
But this is how lawfare works: as a political sound bite.
14. Biden said there are “fewer border crossings today than when Donald Trump left office.”
Biden’s right that there was a surge of crossings after he was elected in 2020. But backing those numbers up to before the election, he’s still wrong.
And the bigger point of course…
14. Cont. …the bigger point is that Biden has been a disaster on the border, allowing in a record number of illegal crossers, setting new monthly records repeatedly, and fast tracking thousands more.
15. Biden trotted out the “suckers” and “losers” comment that Trump allegedly made.
Again, for what feels like the hundredth time, there’s no meaningful evidence supporting this. Just anonymous sources. Even @nytimes took issue (again, one of their five).
16. Biden said “when Trump left office, Europe and NATO were in tatters.”
This is a bit preposterous, in my humble opinion. Remember that Ukraine was invaded not under Trump, but under Biden. Trump had forced NATO countries to actually invest in their own defense. @dankochis
17. Biden said his proposed peace deal “brought us closer” to peace between Israel and Gaza.
That peace deal has already fallen apart.
I’ll close with a couple of barn burners.
18. Biden said “Trump wants to cut Social Security and Medicare.”
What? Trump has repeatedly said he will do no such thing. This is how he won the 2016 nomination!
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
19. Biden claimed Trump “will do everything he can to ban abortion.”
Again. Trump has said *the opposite* repeatedly. Vance said Trump would veto such a measure.
This is just a lie by Biden. Plain and simple.
19. Cont. @bungarsargon makes the point far more eloquently than I can here, on The Commons at American Compass: americancompass.org/let-them-eat-j…
Is it too much to ask the press to bother to do a little fact checking for their favored candidates, after fact-checking Trump’s every word for eight years?
If Dems know they can lie heading into the election unbridled by the media, they will.
I think they’ve already started.
As is often the case, I couldn’t fit everything in a tweet thread. More at my newsletter, @Holden_Court, which you should subscribe to to support me if you like this kind of stuff. open.substack.com/pub/drewholden…
@Holden_Court If you’d like to toss me a couple bucks to fund the beer required to go through this stuff with a chipper spirit, you can do that, too. paypal.com/donate/?busine…
A single poll has bootstrapped a media narrative that DC residents are outraged by Trump’s takeover.
I poked around the cross tabs of the poll — of 600 or so of DC’s more comfortable residents — and I think it’s pretty suspect.
How come? Follow along: ⤵️
Let’s start with the poll. The @washingtonpost talked to 604 people, of whom 90% — 90%! — self-described as living in “very good” or “good” neighborhoods.
So, fine. 80% of people who like where they live in DC are upset.
But even beyond that, it’s worth asking whether this poll really captures DC’s opinion.
In the poll, only 31% describe crime as a “serious” or “very serious” problem in DC.
When @washingtonpost asked this same question in May, *50%* said it was a serious problem.
I feel like I’m losing my mind about the Biden autopen pardons.
The former president said he made every decision. His staff says that he didn’t actually make the final call on thousands of them.
We’re supposed to treat this as normal?
I try to unpack. ⤵️
This got new life from a Biden interview w/ @nytimes.
NYT leads by repeating Biden’s claim that he made the calls…burying the admissions that 1) he really didn’t & 2) where he allegedly did, the aids sending details to the autopen weren’t in the room when the call was made…
…instead, they relied on what senior staff had allegedly heard, which was then passed along.
The piece ends with the revelation that Biden’s then-chief of staff gave the final sign off.
Given what the former admin has lied about, why should we trust this reporting of events?
The coverage of the anti-ICE riots in LA is perhaps the clearest example of advocacy “journalism” in Trump’s second term.
Reading the reporting, you would never know the most significant fact: the American people support Trump’s deportations.
Follow along ⤵️
First, the facts about the riots.
You’ve seen the burning cars, looting & clashes between police & protestors.
Demonstrators blocked the freeway, attacked ICE agents, all in an effort to prevent the deportations of illegal aliens. Trump deployed troops to allow ICE to operate.
As @MarkHalperin and @seanspicer discussed, the situation in LA is so tranquil that the mayor has instituted a curfew for the city.
The new book “Original Sin” from Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson recounts the effort to cover up Biden’s cognitive decline ahead of the election. The authors point to many guilty parties.
The one glaring omission? Their colleagues in the corporate press. Follow along ⤵️
There are numerous dramatic reveals. The Biden team considered condoning him to a wheelchair? Maybe in his fog he forgot about the border?
But as I worked on a review for @commonplc, the one thought that I kept coming back to was that you can’t tell this story without the press.
Perhaps no one was more vital to the continued fiction that Biden had it together than the media.
Tapper and Thompson even highlight some of the telling moments.
Biden’s cancer diagnosis is a tragedy I know first-hand.
But our sympathy can’t silence questions about Biden’s cognitive decline, clarified just days ago by the Hur tape.
The media tried to bury the story then. They’re trying again now.
I’ve got the receipts. ⤵️
When the report first came out in 2024, outlets rushed to demean Hur, accusing him of serving as a Republican hatchet man.
Just look at this take from @USATODAY, who assembled sympathetic voices to make the case that Hur “crossed the line.” They found an expert to call it a “disgrace” and then featured the obviously unbiased Eric Holder to lead a section titled “Way too many gratuitous remarks.”
The audio makes clear that Hur, if anything, played down how alarming the claims were.
(If you haven’t listened to the Hur audio yet, you should.)
It should go without saying, but the media cultivating this type of baseless hysteria about an admin for partisan reasons is much more of a threat to the underpinnings of our democracy than anything Trump has actually done.
Quick 🧵⤵️
A couple quotes:
“If you think that there’s this thing out there called America, and it’s exceptional, that means you don’t have to do anything” to stop fascism.
What? What does that even mean??
That if you, like millions of Americans!, believe in American exceptionalism…you’re a fascist?
Really?
“The powers that be can do whatever they want to you”
Trump can’t even deport people who have deportation orders against them without a federal judge stepping in.