Since the State of the Union speech is one of the most highly visible speeches of any year, it’s an obvious occasion for the “independent fact-checkers” to assess the claims of the president (and theoretically, the official rebuttal from the other party). But how tilted can it be when you compare presidents?
PolitiFact quickly posted its list of Trump checks on Wednesday, and they put their rulings in bold type. Six claims were “False,” and three were “Mostly False,” and another two were “Half True.”
Let’s not question every ruling, but just count them. Trump has a habit of exaggerating something like say, inflation under Biden into "fact check" territory, saying "we suffered the worst inflation in 48 years, but perhaps even in the history of our country, they're not sure."
A year ago, PolitiFact performed the same checking exercise for President Biden’s last speech. It was remarkably softer. Here’s the only way the word “false” came up, backing up a Biden quote:
"This is a moment to speak the truth, to bury lies," Biden said, referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters who believed falsehoods that the 2020 election had been stolen.
Instead of bold-faced proclamations of falsehood, Biden's claims were surrounded by weasel words. Often they carefully massaged Biden in context without sounding like they were judging Biden. When they did, it sounded like this:
This needs context....
The backlog number is higher....
[A] few of his talking points, including on "soaring" consumer confidence and cuts to the deficit, were exaggerated....
It depends on the measure.
This merits asterisks.
This is misleading.
We rated a similar claim by Biden Mostly True.
Some of these were howlers. "This merit asterisks" came from Biden claiming "I’ve already cut the federal deficit by over a trillion dollars." The "asterisks" are the end of massive emergency Covid spending.
The "Misleading" tag came from Biden claiming the effective tax rate for America's billionaires is 8.2 percent. They noted "A White House report arrived at the 8.2% figure by including unrealized gains in the income calculations of the 400 richest U.S. families."
Unrealized gains are when a person's stocks rise in value, but they are not sold -- and thus not taxed. In real life, those are paper gains, not real. In the language of the movies, it's "fairy dust."
Biden's not "false" when he's way off, as they explained: "The actual average tax rate the top 1% of taxpayers pay is more than three times what Biden said: 25.6%, according to IRS data from 2019." [Emphasis mine.]
For an easy exhibit on how PolitiFact CORRECTS Biden without explicitly saying he said something false, read this:
"Inflation has dropped from 9% to 3% — the lowest in the world!"
The U.S. is doing better on managing inflation than most advanced industrialized nations are, but does not rank No. 1 internationally.
Biden is correct that the year-over-year inflation rate has dropped from 9%, a four-decade high, in summer of 2022 to a little above 3% today amid sharp interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.
In December 2023, seven countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — Canada, Denmark, Italy, Latvia,Lithuania, the Netherlands and South Korea — had inflation rates lower than the U.S’. [Emphasis mine.]
