Joe Biden, storyteller in chief, spins yarns that often unravel

Written Michael D. Shear and Linda Qiu
Standing in front of Floridians who had lost everything during Hurricane Ian, President Joe Biden on Wednesday recalled his own house being nearly destroyed 15 years ago: “We didn’t lose our whole home, but lightning struck and we lost an awful lot of it,” he said.
Biden has mentioned the incident before, once saying he knows what it’s like “having had a house burn down with my wife in it.”
In fact, news reports at the time called it little more than “a small fire that was contained to the kitchen” and quoted the local Delaware fire chief as saying that “the fire was under control in 20 minutes.”
The story is not an isolated example of embellishment.
The exaggerated biography that Biden tells includes having been a fierce civil rights activ who was repeatedly arrested. He has claimed to have been an award-winning student who earned three degrees. And last week, speaking on the hurricane-devastated island of Puerto Rico, he said he had been “raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically.”
Then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) poses for photographs with his family after announcing his candidacy for the Democratic presidenctial nomination in Wilmington, on June 9, 1987. (Keith Meyers/The New York Times)
For more than four decades, Biden has embraced storytelling as a way of connecting with his audience, often emphasizing the truth of his account adding “Not a joke!” in the middle of a story. But Biden’s folksiness can veer into folklore, with dates that don’t quite add up and details that are exaggerated or wrong, the factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful for audiences.
Biden’s instances of exaggeration and falsehood fall far well short of those of his predecessor, who during four years in office delivered what the Washington Post fact checker called a “tsunami of untruths” and CNN described as a “staggering avalanche of daily wrongness.”
Former President Donald Trump lied constantly, not only about trivial details (such as insing it hadn’t rained during his inauguration when it clearly had) but about consequential moments — misleading about the pandemic, perpetrating the “big lie” that Biden stole the 2020 election and claiming falsely that the Capitol was not attacked his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.
Biden’s fictions are nowhere near that scale. But they are emblematic of how the president, over nearly five decades in public life, has been unable to break himself of the habit of spinning embellished narratives, sometimes only loosely based on the facts, to weave together his political identity. And they provide political ammunition for Republicans eager to tar him as too feeble to run for reelection in two years.
His stories have been repeatedly and publicly challenged, as far back as his 1987 campaign for president, when his attempts to adopt someone else’s life story as his own, and his false claims about his academic record, forced him to withdraw.
President Joe Biden speaks after receiving a briefing on federal emergency relief efforts following Hurricane Fiona in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on Oct. 3, 2022. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)
“He obviously has this tendency, where he’s a good and decent man who in politics has felt like he could stretch the truth up to a point just like virtually every president has done,” said Eric Alterman, author of “Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie — and Why Trump Is Worse” and a professor at City University of New York.
“With Biden, people have decided these are not the kind of lies that matter,” Alterman added. “These are the kinds of lies that people’s grandfathers tell.”
White House officials disputed the characterization of Biden as a serial exaggerator and emphasized the contrast with his predecessor.
“President Biden has brought honesty and integrity back to the Oval Office,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson. “Like he promised, he gives the American people the truth right from the shoulder and takes pride in being straight with the country about his agenda and his values; including sharing life experiences that have shaped his outlook and that hardworking people relate to.”
But ethics said contrasting himself with Trump does not excuse Biden.
“I worry about the corrosive effects on democracy, of making ‘more honest than Donald Trump’ the standard for politicians,” said Michael Blake, a professor of philosophy, public policy and governance at the University of Washington.
Two days before his remarks in Fort Myers, Florida, Biden made his comments about the Puerto Rican community back home in Delaware as he toured the destruction on the island.
I’m one of you, he seemed to be saying.
Then President Barack Obama awards Sgt. Kyle J. White with the Presidential Medal of Honor at the White House on May 12, 2014. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)
But Biden made not a single mention of Puerto Rico in either of his biographies. Officials could not point to specific instances when Biden had worked on issues involving the island, although Ted Kaufman, Biden’s former chief of staff, defended his close friend’s description, saying Biden had personally engaged with Puerto Ricans early in his career, in the same way he had with other groups, such as the Black or Jewish communities.
“You know, all that kind of casework that you do,” Kaufman said. “They were big on that. Plus, he went to their events.”
Many presidents, of course, have stretched the truth — in ways big and small.
Bill Clinton lied under oath when he said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” Ronald Reagan insed that he did not “trade weapons or anything else for hostages” during the Iran-Contra investigation.
Like Biden, Reagan exaggerated his own actions, once saying that he had shot footage of Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II. He never did.
Biden’s critics have seized on his falsehoods to depict him as either a purposeful liar or a forgetful old man.
“When you lie about big things, you lie about small things,” Greg Kelly, a host on the conservative network Newsmax, said this year, “and always in a political sense, always in a way to try to get people to like him, and exaggerating along the way.”
Biden has been delivering exaggerations at least as far back as his first presidential campaign.
During his first presidential run in 1987, Biden said he “went to law school on a full academic scholarship,” bragged that he “ended up in the top half” of his law school class and insed that he “graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school.”
If fact, as he later admitted, he had only a partial scholarship, was 76th out of 85 law school student and graduated with one bachelor’s degree (with a double major in hory and political science).
“I exaggerate when I’m angry,” Biden told The New York Times in September 1987, “but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.”
The controversy came shortly after Biden admitted plagiarizing parts of a speech from Neil Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party in Britain at the time. Biden dropped out of the presidential contest.
Thirty-two years later, as he campaigned for the presidency in 2019, Biden described how he had traveled to Afghanan to pin a Silver Star on a Navy captain for retrieving the body of a fellow American from a 60-foot ravine.
“This is the God’s truth,” he said, repeating a story he had told many times, “my word as a Biden.”
But as The Washington Post pointed out, it was an Army special, not a Navy captain, who had rescued his comrade. Former President Barack Obama, not Biden, awarded that soldier the Presidential Medal of Honor, not the Silver Star. And the ceremony took place at the White House, not in Afghanan.
White House officials said Biden was recalling a time years later, when he went to Afghanan to pin a Bronze Star on an Army soldier. But as the Post put it: “In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.”
Since becoming president, he has continued to shave the truth.
At least four times, Biden has described a ride on Amtrak to visit his sick mother in 2015 or 2016, recalling a conversation with a friendly train conductor. But Biden’s mother died in 2010. The conductor also had been dead for several years 2015.
Last year, Biden said he remembered “spending time at” and “going to” the Tree of Life Synagogue, where 11 people were massacred in 2018. The White House later admitted he had never visited but had talked to the rabbi on the phone.
The most curious stories that Biden continues to tell may be the ones about his interactions with the law.
Earlier this year, Biden suggested during a speech in Atlanta on voting rights that he had been arrested while protesting for civil rights.
“Because I’m so damn old, I was there as well,” he said. “You think I’m kidding, man. It seems like yesterday the first time I got arrested.”
There is no evidence he was ever arrested during a civil-rights protest.
During the 2020 campaign, he said he had been arrested while visiting Nelson Mandela in South Africa. He later admitted he had been blocked from moving police but not arrested. In 2008, he said he had been arrested as a college student following a group of women into an all-female dorm. He hadn’t, as he conceded years later. In 2007, he recounted being arrested a Capitol Police officer as a 21-year-old student in 1963. But in his memoir, he writes that the officer “didn’t arrest me or anything.”
The White House said Biden was referring in the voting rights speech to a story his mother told about a time when he was a teenager and was brought home police after standing with a Black couple during a desegregation fight.
Adminration officials pointed to other interviews where he said, “I wasn’t John Lewis. I don’t mean to imply that.”
Blake suggested that there could be a cumulative effect even if Biden had excuses and explanations for individual instances of inaccuracy.
“It’s an attempt to create a sort of picture of who he is as someone who has empathy and knowledge and connection with people who are unlike him,” Blake said.
“But the problem is,” he added, “when it’s verifiably a false story, at that point trust in that story, it fails.”