President Biden forgot key facts about the economy, foreign policy and his time in public office during a sit-down interview with Time magazine last month — even mixing up Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Biden, 81, repeated a false claim that wage increases have outpaced inflation during his presidency, lowballed the amount of US foreign aid to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022 and overestimated both Japan’s defense spending and the population of Africa, according to a post-interview fact check by Time.
“Wage increases have exceeded what the cost of inflation, which you’re talking about as the prices that were pre-COVID prices,” Biden told the magazine’s staff writers in the May 28 interview.
Real average hourly earnings, seasonally adjusted, have increased 0.5% from April 2023 to April 2024, according to the latest US Bureau of Labor Statistics report, but median weekly wages have not kept up with inflation.
Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 — a surge Biden has attempted to blame on his predecessor — the highest increase seen since the early 1980s.
Asked immediately after whether his newly announced tariffs on Chinese goods would hike consumer prices, Biden confused the names of the leaders of America’s two great foreign adversaries.
“No, because here’s the deal. There’s a difference. I made it clear to Putin from the very beginning that—I’m not, we’re not engaging in,” Biden answered before trailing off briefly.
“For example, Trump wants a 10% tariff on everything. That will raise the price of everything in America,” he said.
An editor’s note from Time reads: “Biden appeared to mean Xi here, not Putin.”
Turning to the war in Ukraine, Biden said at another point, “We spent a lot of money in Ukraine, but Europe has spent more money than the United States has, collectively,” adding moments later that he “spent a month in Ukraine when I was a senator and vice president.”
The US has provided more money — about $68 billion more — than the European Union since Putin’s Feb. 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine.
The EU’s total spending for Kyiv’s defense and humanitarian assistance is roughly $107 billion, the same as the amount of US aid for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government.
The Post was also unable to find contemporaneous reports that Biden visited Ukraine when serving as a US senator from Delaware between 1973 and 2009, during which he chaired the powerful Foreign Relations Committee for 12 years.
The EU’s total spending for Kyiv’s defense and humanitarian assistance is roughly $107 billion, the same as the amount of US aid for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government.
“Did you ever think if I told you that Japan would be devoting 3% of its GDP to defense and make a rapprochement at Camp David with South Korea as an overwhelming threat that exists to North Korea as well as to Europe?” the president asked his interviewers rhetorically during another question on US Indo-Pacific strategy.
According to World Bank data, Japan has spent around 1% of its GDP on defense since 1960.
After being quizzed about voters’ concerns over him being the oldest-ever president, Biden pointed to the trillions of dollars in federal spending he signed into law, which former officials from the Obama White House have said contributed to skyrocketing inflation along with his unprecedented student loan cancellations.
“I can do it better than anybody you know,” he answered when asked whether he was ready to serve a second term that will conclude when he turns 86 years old. “Watch me. Look, name me a president that’s gotten as much done as I’ve gotten done in my first three and a half years.”
“You’re looking at me, I can take you too,” he also told one of the Time journalists, seemingly joking about getting into a brawl.
“I remember when I was heading to Taiwan, excuse me, to South Korea, to reclaim the chips industry that we had gotten $865 billion in private-sector investment, private-sector investments since I’ve been in. Name me a president who’s done that,” Biden went on, inaccurately conflating his trip to the Asian nation in 2022 with the investment announcement last month.
At yet another point, he suggested the population in Africa would grow to “a billion people” in the coming years, though it currently sits at around 1.4 billion.