The former president unleased an attack on Biden that was filled with falsehoods.
President Biden announced that he was running for president with a gauzy video that left little to fact-check. There was a brief reference to “MAGA Republicans” wanting to cut Social Security — when all sides in the budget debate have agreed to leave the retirement program off the table — but otherwise the presidential announcement was policy-light.
Not so for former president Donald Trump, who is running hard to win the presidency back. His statement, delivered in his own video, is one misleading attack after another. Here’s a line-by-line dissection.
This is rhetorical overkill. For what it’s worth, the Siena College Research Institute in September released rankings of the worst and best presidents based on a survey of historians, political scientists and presidential scholars. Trump ranked 43rd, third from the bottom. Biden ranked 19th, between Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Barack Obama, whom Biden served as vice president, ranked 11th.
The reasons for inflation are complex. Biden’s 2021 coronavirus relief bill may have contributed to the sudden increase in prices. But inflation spiked around the globe after the pandemic, increasing faster in many other countries, suggesting that this is not a problem resulting only from presidential spending priorities. Trump throws in the word “socialist” for no apparent reason, except that it’s red meat for his supporters.
Some banks have failed because they didn’t properly manage inflation-rate risk. The U.S. dollar soared early in Biden’s term — up as much as 8.9 percent in the Wall Street Journal’s dollar index during 2022, the biggest yearly rise since 2014. Now it’s come back to earth. The dollar only became the world’s reserve currency in 1944.
There are various ways to measure “real wages,” but real disposable personal income per capita, a measure favored by economists, is basically flat from December 2020 to February 2023. Ordinarily, however, one would expect it to increase year over year.
As president, Trump would falsely claim the United States had achieved energy independence.
