• On our Truth-O-Meter, Biden has been rated True 21 times, Mostly True 37 times, Half True 36 times, Mostly False 30 times, False 26 times, and Pants on Fire six times. Of these 156 ratings, about 40% were in the bottom half of our ratings system, that is, Mostly False or below.
Recently, Biden said that “a Black man invented the light bulb, not a white guy named Edison,” which inflated the role of another inventor and earned a Mostly False.
When Biden said after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that “there’s no court session between now and the end of this election,” that was easily disproved by the high court’s own website. We rated it False.
Biden earned a False when he said, “Military COVID infected: 118,984. Military COVID deaths: 6,114.” His campaign said he misread the numbers for Michigan, not the military.
Biden was also incorrect to say he was the first person to call for invoking the Defense Production Act to fight the coronavirus; we found multiple Democrats who urged that course before he did.
Early in the pandemic, Biden earned a False for saying that because the Federal Reserve had recently cut interest rates to near 0%, “the Fed will be of little consequence now. They’ve already used what leverage they have.” Experts told us there were other levers that the Fed could use to protect the economy.
And Biden went too far in criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration policies, saying the Obama administration “didn’t lock people up in cages.” Under Obama, that did happen at times, though not as extensively as would later happen under Trump.
Biden also misremembered or miscast an experience from his own life, saying, “I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see (Nelson Mandela) on Robbens Island.” Biden was actually stopped at an airport when he was traveling with African American colleagues; PolitiFact interviewed former UN ambassador Andrew Young to confirm the details. Biden later changed his story to say that he was stopped but not arrested.
