Biden’s 18-Wheeler Claim Debunked Again
President Joe Biden has repeated a previously debunked claim that he used to drive an 18-wheeler. The claim, which he made during a campaign stop in Tampa, has been disputed by fact-checkers who found no evidence that the president ever held such a job.
A person in the crowd, who said Teamsters were “in the house,” credited the president for a pension he received at his job. “We did get that done. Anyways. Besides, I used to drive an 18-wheeler,” Biden said to the crowd member.
Biden previously brought up the claim in November 2021 while touting his administration’s infrastructure work at Dakota County Technical College in Minnesota, according to Politifact’s fact check. “I used to drive a tractor trailer, so I know a little bit about driving big trucks,” the president previously said. “I only did it for part of a summer, but I got my license anyway.”
Politifact reports that “there’s no record that he drove an 18-wheeler, the typical meaning of a tractor trailer.”
“The closest experience he had was in 1973, when, as a senator, he rode along on a 536-mile tractor-trailer trip from Delaware to Ohio,” Politifact wrote. The outlet adds that Biden was likely referring to his former summer job as a bus driver.
Snopes wrote that Biden was never a professional trucker and that the president appeared to be referencing the 536-mile passenger experience he had in 1973.
Fox News previously reached out to the White House following Biden’s 2021 claims asking if the president ever drove a tractor trailer. A White House spokesperson pointed the outlet to an article from 1973 detailing Biden’s ride in the truck as a senator.
The 81-year-old president has drawn attention to his stamina and fitness for office. The president’s fitness came into question in February after special counsel Robert Hur said in his report regarding Biden’s handling of classified documents that a potential jury might see Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden also falsely claimed that his uncle, Second Lt. Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr., was shot down over New Guinea during World War II and never found because there were “a lot of cannibals” on the island. The official U.S. military account of Finnegan’s death does not match the president’s claims, as the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said that the plane was ditched into the ocean for unknown reasons.
The White House defended the president’s tale during an April press briefing. “He takes this very seriously. His uncle who served and protected this country lost his life serving, and that should matter,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.
