The DNC Was Dominated by Lies

Because the mainstream press largely won't, I decided to do some fact-checking

The Democratic National Convention that concluded last week had one clear through-line: a willingness to bend, if not outright flout, the truth. While the press spent the event largely clapping along to the “joy” and “vibes” and general celebration of the event, I thought it might make sense for someone to do a thorough fact-check, at least of part of it.

One particular moment stood out to me: President Joe Biden’s address on day one, which featured a head-spinning number of falsehoods and fabrications. I don’t have the space to robustly evaluate each claim, so I tried to focus on the easily verifiable (or, in most case, dis-verifiable).

Here are some.

*all quotes come from the USA Today transcript of his remarks.

1. Biden claimed “democracy has prevailed” with Harris on the ballot.

The Facts: Whatever else one may think about when it comes to Harris’s ascension, it isn’t a victory for democracy. She’s never won a single presidential primary vote. She was anointed Biden’s replacement. And that’s before one considers her attacks on the rest of the government. As I explained a couple of weeks ago on The Commons at American Compass, it was anything but a victory of democracy.

2. Biden alleged Trump said there were ‘very fine people on both sides’ at Charlottesville in the 2017 “Unite the Right” protest.

The Facts: Even the liberal fact-checker Snopes has fact-checked this. The quote has been taken out of context, and Biden continues repeating it, despite countless liberal media outlets making clear it isn’t a legitimate claim.

3. Biden claimed he “demonizes no one.”

The Facts: Biden has routinely demonized Trump supporters, calling them “threats to democracy” and “a threat to the very soul of this country.”

4. Biden claimed to have rebuilt “the backbone of America — the middle class.”

The Facts: Recent data from Pew Research Center finds that, since 2019 before Biden took often, the middle class has actually shrunk.

5. Biden claimed he has created a “record 60 million new jobs.”

The Facts: This number is enormously off-base. Even if you wanted to (charitably) assume that Biden meant to say “16 million new jobs,” his math is still wrong. The Department of Labor recently corrected the number of jobs added in the last twelve months to drop that figure by nearly one million. And even those numbers are squishy: As Zach Halashack explains in the Washington Examiner Biden counts jobs that were lost during the pandemic and regained thereafter, rather than new job growth.

6. Biden claimed inflation was “down, way down.”

The Facts: While inflation may be “way down” compared to the 40-year high that Biden drove it to, it remains higher than it was when he came into office.

It’s one thing to fudge the numbers. But here Biden is essentially lying through his teeth.

7. Biden said he had delivered the “smallest racial wealth gap in 20 years.”

The Facts: Even the New York Times took issue with this one, if still trying to give Biden the benefit of the doubt, fudging the facts in service of that aim. The ‘context’ it ‘needs’ appears to be that Biden is abusing statistics.

8. Biden said that, thanks to a new law he signed, “instead of paying $400 a month for insulin, seniors with diabetes will pay $35 a month.”

The Facts: This is another case where Biden appears to transpose numbers. Right now, seniors, on average, pay $400 a year for insulin, not a month. The new law is expected to therefore save a few dollars a month. But apparently that doesn’t sound as flashy.

My favorite part of this, though, was how the Times “fact-checked” it, saying that the claim “needs context.” That ‘context,’ apparently, is that Biden made up the number.

9. Biden said his administration was “removing every lead pipe from schools and homes.”

The Facts: He isn’t, as even CNN called out (one of the few claims CNN took issue with…let me know if you think there might be more than that from this list) Biden essentially doesn’t have a path to doing so.

10. Biden said his administration was “providing affordable high-speed internet for every American no matter where they live.”

The Facts: This is one of a number of claims where Biden has promised to do something, appears far off-track from delivering, but still claims credit for it. There are maybe tens of millions of Americans without high-speed internet; perhaps as many as one-in-five households. The progress toward eliminating this “digital divide” is halting.

11. Biden claimed we’re “cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030.”

The Facts: Again, Biden has promised we’re going to do this. But it doesn’t appear to be materializing. The U.S. is considerably off-track on Biden’s pledged emissions target, according to recent reports whose numbers themselves may be too high, given lagging adoption of EVs and renewable energy sources.

Speaking of EVs and the rollout of the renewable energy to allegedly get us to this target…

12. Biden said the U.S. is in the process of installing “500,000 charging stations” for EVs.

The Facts: So far, we have seven, as the Washington Post has reported.

That’s not seven thousand. Not even seven hundred.

Seven. Total.

Despite a huge investment of your tax dollars.

At the current seven-per-two-years pace, it might take a while to get there.

13. Biden claimed his administration “kept our commitment to provide more student relief than ever.”

The Facts: The student loan relief plan that Biden campaigned on would have delivered $10,000 in debt forgiveness per borrower. It famously didn’t survive contact with the Constitution.

Again. Saying his administration is going to do something does not mean Biden deserves credit for doing something. Nor should the media give him a pass for doing so. It’s dishonest.

14. Biden said “I’m so damn old.”

The Facts: Well, you be the judge. Doesn’t strike me as inaccurate.

15. Biden claimed “Americans are safer today than under Donald Trump.”

The Facts: The United States and our allies are engulfed in significantly more conflict now than when Trump left office. I wrote about this dynamic for the Washington Free Beacon last February.

16. Biden called Trump a “convicted felon.”

The Facts: This might be the most egregious falsehood Biden uttered during his speech. Trump is not, of course, a convicted anything, and Biden’s undermining Trump’s presumption of innocence is the real stuff of a demagogue. It also underlines what the Democrats’ prosecutions of Trump so often appear designed to deliver: political soundbites for Trump’s opponents.

17. Biden, when discussing the assault weapons ban he passed in 1994 said, “and guess what? It worked!”

The Facts: The bill’s own report, when the policy lapsed in 2004, said that it’s results were “mixed.” And that was in the narrow context of using it as a mechanism to reduce mass shootings. The idea that “it worked” in the sense Biden and Harris point to—as a general violence reduction measure—is even more dubious.

18. Biden, when discussing immigration and the border, said “there are fewer border crossings today than when Donald Trump left office.”

The Facts: After the election, there was a surge in crossings and attempted crossings with the news that Biden had won, beginning before Biden took office. Looking at the months before the election, Biden is still wrong to say that numbers have fallen, even using his own math.

And doing so, of course, elides the numbers that really matter. Under the Biden administration, the U.S. has seen a record number of new illegal immigrants enter the country. He repeatedly set single-month records for illegal crossings. And that’s before one even considers the hundreds of thousands of crossings the administration has facilitated using the CBP One app.

But according to Biden, Trump is the one lying about the border.

17. Biden said that Trump called soldiers killed in action “suckers” and “losers” in Normandy.

The Facts: Again, even the Times took issue with this claim, which has never been verified on the record, and relies exclusively on anonymous sources. Trump has vehemently denied it. Those two things, in tandem, should probably count for something.

18. Biden claimed that “when Trump left office, Europe and NATO were in tatters.”

The Facts: One of Trump’s chief international accomplishments was forcing NATO countries in Europe to commit more money to their own defense (on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, I might add), as Daniel Kochis explained at the time for the Heritage Foundation. They certainly weren’t in tatters.

19. Biden said that his peace treaty for Israel/Gaza “brought us closer” to peace “than we’ve been since October 7th.”

The Facts: That treaty just fell apart. Again, in the most cynically political way, Biden repeatedly made claims of success as a result of his effort to do something, often when the hope in that actual success was tenuous, or flat-out dismal.

20. Biden claimed “Trump wants to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

The Facts: Trump has repeatedly said that he wouldn’t cut either program. That’s how he won the GOP nomination in 2016! He was the only Republican who said that the programs shouldn’t be cut. Voters loved it. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

21. Biden claimed “Trump will do everything he can to ban abortion nationwide.”

The Facts: Trump has repeatedly said he would do no such thing, and has often faced pushback from conservatives for not being pro-life enough. JD Vance recently said Trump would veto a nationwide abortion ban.

Trump has repeatedly said he would do the opposite of what Biden (and other Democrats) claimed, as Batya Ungar-Sargon explained last week on The Commons at American Compass. Instead of lies from Biden and others, if you want a thoughtful assessment of what actually happened at the DNC, you should give it a read.

The takeaway: These were just the low-hanging fruit, the easily disproven claims I caught reading through Biden’s remarks. And yet, when it came to media fact-checking, many of these were omitted.

CNN included a total of seven claims, most of which were “misleading” or “needed context.” That’s better than NYT, who only noted five, two of which were said to “need context” when they were in fact mathematically wrong.

You’ve heard me beat the drum of the media not feeling the need to uphold its responsibilities when it comes to Democrats ahead of an election.

Get ready for more of it.