The Republican National Committee circulated a “fact check” on Twitter of whether President Joe Biden drove an 18-wheeler after a speech on manufacturing to a Mack truck facility in Pennsylvania.
“There is *zero evidence* that Biden ‘used to drive an 18 wheeler,’” tweeted the RNC’s Zach Parkinson. “The extent of Biden’s trucking experience is that he **rode in** a truck once, for one night in 1973 (he made sure to return home by plane though).”
Joe Biden, a career politician who has been in politics for 48 years, claims he “used to drive an 18 wheeler.” pic.twitter.com/eOXI9pwF2g
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 28, 2021
Parkinson cited a December 1973 UPI opinion piece in which Biden, then a Democratic senator, wrote that he took a 536-mile ride from his home state of Delaware to Ohio in a “47,000 pound cargo truck” to learn more about the plight of truck drivers during the energy crisis.
“I made the trip because I wanted a firsthand account from the truckers, who say they carry 50 per cent of all the goods shipped within the United States,” Biden, then serving his first Senate term, wrote. “They make a case worth listening to.”
Although he does not appear on camera, a local news channel picked up audio of Biden telling workers Wednesday, “I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man … I got to.” Biden was elected to the Senate at age 29.
“Well, I’m not going to say anything; I just came to drive a truck,” Biden said to audience laughter at the beginning of his Wednesday speech at the facility. “And I’m not sure which one I want to drive. That one? There’s one back in the corner you can’t see. It’s the biggest damn pickup truck you ever saw in your life.”
Biden previously drove Ford’s F-150 Lightning pickup truck during a May 18 visit to a Dearborn, Michigan, electrical vehicle plant. That also aroused controversy when a blog claimed Biden wasn’t really driving. Fact-checkers refuted this.
But Biden has faced criticism for embellishing biographical details for years, including misstatements about his academic credentials that helped bring about the end to his 1988 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Former President Donald Trump also liked trucks, doing photo-ops in which he pretended to honk the horn.
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Biden has traveled to states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania in a bid to win working-class voters back to the Democratic column. He narrowly won the latter state last year but lost Ohio by the same margin as Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Biden has been promoting his “Buy American” and “Build It Back Better” initiatives. “I reject out of hand — I’ve been criticized for this for some time — but I reject out of hand this defeatist view that the forces of automation and globalization mean we can’t have good-paying union jobs in America,” he said Wednesday.
