Jim Geraghty of National Review Online pokes large holes in one of President Biden’s clearly false claims.
Anyone other than the president clearly remembers that inflation raised very little concern for the average household before Biden moved into the White House. Yet he seems to think that his administration has helped tackle a problem that he inherited from his predecessor — and potential successor — Donald Trump.
President Biden, in an interview with Yahoo Finance today, repeated his false claim that inflation was 9 percent when he took office in January 2021. “I think inflation has gone slightly up. It was at 9 percent when I came in, and it’s now down around 3 percent.”
As you know, this is horse … pucky. Biden’s decision to make this false claim twice in a five-day span offers a few possibilities, none of them good.
One possibility is that Biden knows this is false, and this is a deliberate effort to mislead the public and get people to associate high inflation with Donald Trump’s presidency and not his own.
Another possibility is that Biden misremembers the inflation rate when he took office, he was informed that his claim was false, and he has since forgotten the correct numbers. Special counsel Robert Hur, among others, contended that Biden’s memory is poor.
Another possibility is that Biden misremembers the inflation rate when he took office, said so publicly, and no one around the president has told him, “Mr. President, when you took office, the inflation rate was just 1.4 percent, you can’t go around claiming that it was 9 percent.” Meaning we have a president who operates in a fog of half-truths and illusory claims that reflect the way he wishes things had happened, and no one around the president sees any point in correcting him.
