It has been said that former president Donald Trump cannot be fact-checked because he is immune to the shame that traditionally accompanies being knowingly mendacious. If that’s true, the former president is rivaled only by the current president — or, at least, by Joe Biden’s communications team:
This is hardly the first time this president’s White House has touted its record of “creating more jobs than any Administration in history at this point in a presidency.” At this point, it is unavoidably apparent that this White House doesn’t mind misleading the public, and it cannot be embarrassed out of that campaign of misinformation. That’s not for lack of trying. Reality-based political observers have used every available tool to impose some propriety on this White House to no avail.
They’ve tried using Twitter’s community-notes feature to persuade Joe Biden’s aides to desist. Citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, social-media users reminded the administration that its graphic representation of job creation does not illustrate the creation of “new” jobs but, rather, the recovery of the existing economy that was decimated by an engineered recession at the outset of the pandemic.
Nor can the media’s fact-checking industry puncture the White House bubble. As Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler noted as early as June 2021, not only is Biden claiming credit for conditions over which he has no control, he elides in his assertions Barack Obama’s underwhelming record on job creation. As CNN’s Daniel Dale conceded, “it is clear that there could only be such an extraordinary number of jobs added in 2021 and 2022 because there was such an extraordinary number of jobs lost in early 2020.” Even an outlet as generous as PolitiFact can’t muster more than a “Half True” rating for the president’s boasts regarding his job-creation record.
To these gentle admonitions, the White House’s response has been abject contempt. Neither Joe Biden nor his team care that they are distorting the record in the pursuit of a political objective. They’re going to keep doing it, too, until you get tired of your commitment to getting the facts right. As the two most recent presidents have demonstrated, the truth is a sucker’s game.