Fact Checking The Debate: Biden's Senility v. Trump's False Claims

Even the least discerning readers of this blog know that the theme of most posts over the last four years has been that neither Biden or Trump is fit to be president of the United States - some post titles were dead giveaways to this theme such as Neither Trump Nor Biden Deserves To Be President Again & Both Trump & Biden Have Disqualified Themselves From The Presidency.

Biden's performance in the June 27 presidential debate was so dismal that it not only caused him to drop out of the race but it made Trump's false claims during the debate that much harder to pick up except for professional fact checkers & readers of RTE.  

For instance, Trump absurdly stated, totally out of touch with political reality, that "everybody" wanted Roe v. Wade overturned with each state making their own abortion policy.  Trump said "Everybody wanted to get it back to the states, everybody, without exception: Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives.  Everybody wanted it back.  Religious leaders." & then added "Every legal scholar wanted it that way."  This falsehood was stunning to me.

Starting with conservative Kansas, less than two months after Roe was overturned, state after state (Kentucky, California, Vermont, Michigan, & Ohio) moved in the pro abortion direction with ballot initiatives.  Eleven other states (Florida, Arizona, Montana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, & Maryland) are planning to put abortion directly on the ballot in November to either directly reject further restrictions or fully enshrine abortion into their constitutions.  We know that Trump is aware that the 2022 midterm supposed "red wave" Republican victory never appeared because it was overwhelmed by the abortion issue - prompting Trump to say "You have to win elections" so say or do whatever you have to on abortion "to win elections."  And that is exactly what Trump did during the presidential debate.

But Biden was so inept during the debate that he could not even muster up a response to Trump's gross misstatement on abortion.

When Biden could try (instead of just standing there with his mouth open) to discuss an issue it too was terrible.  For instance, Biden's claim that "Truth is, I'm the only president this century that doesn't have any, this decade, that doesn't have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did," referring to Trump.

Of course this falsehood does not mention the thirteen U.S. service members (11 Marines, one Army special operations soldier, and one Navy corpsman) who were killed in the suicide bombing @ the airport in Kabul during the hideous Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021 following the Taliban re-taking of the country.  Biden also overlooks the three U.S. soldiers killed this year in Jordan by a drone attack instigated by Iran-backed militants.  Also two U.S. Navy Seals died in January in Somolian waters while attempting to seize lethal aid being transported from Iran to Yemen, & five U.S. soldiers died in a helicopter crash in the Mediterranean Sea in November 2023 during a routine refueling mission.  Lastly, eight U.S. airmen died in a CV-22 Osprey crash off the coast of Yakushima Island, Japan.

All told, according to the CNN fact checker Daniel Dale (whose work I relied on in this post based on my personal knowledge & previous RTE posts) Biden made @ least nine false or misleading statements during the debate - hard to believe he could muster up that many statements, false or otherwise.  Biden's misleading statements wandered through claims of Trump wanting to eliminate Social Security, saying unemployment was 15% when he took office, & incorrectly saying the Border Patrol union endorsed him before clarifying that he meant the border bill he had backed that was negotiated by Lankford (R-OK), Sinema (I-AZ), & Murphy (D-CT).

But the enormous unanswered question is why is Biden still president if he is so incapacitated that he could not perform better in a debate on his favored CNN.  If the debate proved anything it is that Biden should finally be given the cognitive test as a bare bones minimum to see if he can finish his term.  In the meantime, if this elderly man with a poor memory, who is @ least slightly senile, continues as president we are literally playing with a stick of dynamite that has a lit fuse.

Also, Kamala Harris immediately came on TV after the debate & continued the lie that Biden is as sharp as can be behind closed doors - this was before the knives came out to get rid of Biden's liability as a candidate for president.  But Harris certainly knew better - like all of us.  This is one of the questions she should answer along with 1) what is fracking, & 2) in your assignment from President Biden to lead our efforts with Mexico & the Northern Triangle countries to stem migration to our southern border did you ever issue a written report addressing both the root causes of & your recommendations for quieting the disorder @ the southwest land border that began right after the Biden-Harris administration took office.  Questions 1 & 2 were recommended by Steve Moore & Bill O'Reilly respectively.

Fact checker Dale logged in nine whoppers for Biden during the debate & "@ least thirty for Trump."

During the debate Trump said 1) that Democrats will kill babies in the "eighth month, the ninth month of pregnancy, or even after birth" (no state allows infanticide & 95.6% of abortions occur before 16 weeks of pregnancy & only 0.9% occurred @ 21 weeks or later in 2020); 2) that Biden will quadruple people's taxes (Biden's budget proposal for fiscal year 2024 calls for people making $60,000 per year to pay less tax than under current law while middle income households would pay about the same); 3) that Pelosi turned down 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the Capitol on January 6, 2021 (there is no record of Trump offering troops to Pelosi & even if he did Pelosi has no authority over the deployment of the District of Columbia National Guard, which is under the command of the president); 4) that Americans don't pay the cost of his tariffs on China & other countries (it is U.S. importers, not Chinese exporters, who make the actual tariff payments to the government meaning the American consumer ultimately foots the bill); 5) that the 2020 presidential election was marred by fraud (there has never been any evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state, but we do know that Rudy, Mark Meadows, Jenna Ellis, & Sydney Powell have experienced a world of hurt claiming otherwise & Fox paid almost $1 billion to Dominion for broadcasting such falsehoods); 6) that under Biden, "We have the largest (trade) deficit with China" (in 2023 the Biden trade deficit with China was the lowest since 2010 while under Trump in 2018 the trade deficit with China hit a new record high - see graphic below); & 7) that the U.S. currently has its biggest budget deficit (this claim from Trump who presided over the largest deficit spending in any four year period since the founding of the country - see graphic below.)

  Click on graphic to enlarge

Over the years I have written about the significance of the national debt many times in blog posts & over the past four years have received many comments from die hard Trump supporters who acknowledge that Trump is the biggest four year spender in the country's history but shrug it off by saying "In my opinion, voters don't care about ... the debt."

Now isn't it one thing to not care about the national debt & another thing to not care about being lied to about it?