President Joe Biden repeated a previously debunked claim during a campaign stop Tuesday in Florida that he used to drive an 18-wheeler.
While giving informal remarks at a campaign stop in Tampa, Biden mentioned that he used to drive an 18-wheeler. Biden’s claim, which he made once in 2021, has previously been debunked by PolitiFact and Snopes, who found no evidence that the president once 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 responded 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 under fire 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.” (RELATED: Dem Rep Baselessly Accuses Robert Hur Of Doing ‘Everything You Can Do’ To Reelect Trump)
The president committed a gaffe earlier in April while visiting a Pennsylvania war memorial. Biden remembered his uncle, Second Lt. Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr., and claimed he was shot down during WWII over “New Guinea” 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 writes that the plane was ditched into the ocean for unknown reasons. (RELATED: McDonald’s, Missiles & Marches: Biden’s Thursday Devolves Into All-Time Gaffe Reel)
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.