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 since Biden took office in January 2021.
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.
