President Joe Biden keeps telling lies. He just told a New Hampshire crowd of “having had a house burn down with my wife in it — she got out safely, God willing.” In fact, the Associated Press reports, it was a minor kitchen fire, with no damage visible from outside.
He’s overblown the incident in the past, albeit not as much. Nor can he stop talking about a chat with an Amtrak conductor in his seventh year as vice president, when the guy retired 15 years before Biden became veep and had died by the year of the tale.
Biden claims he was offered a job by an Idaho lumber company; they have no record. He claims he “used to drive” an 18-wheeler — it didn’t happen. He’s said he visited Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue after the 2018 massacre, speaking to the rabbi, when the synagogue says he’s never even been there.
It’s a schtick and a disturbing one: He invents stuff in order to make a seemingly personal connection with his audience, but it’s a phony connection. Biden has been in Washington almost his entire adult life, he’s not a blue-collar worker struggling to get by.
Even when there’s some truth, he exaggerates — as when he chats with Gold Star families about his late son Beau as if he’d died in action, rather than of brain cancer.
Look: You can show empathy without an actual shared experience. Insisting on making one up isn’t truly relating, it’s a calculated con job.
It would be bad enough if Biden only told personal tall tales. But his reality distortion field now extends to national policy. He routinely insists “all the economists” back his plans, writes off inflation as a temporary spike, insists the border surge is just “seasonal,” even calls his disastrous Afghan bugout a “success” (while falsely claiming his generals didn’t object).
Truth just doesn’t matter: He’ll say whatever he likes to get past the moment. He got away with it for most of his life because nobody bothers to fact-check a Delaware senator.
Now he’s president, and his lies are going to hurt us all.