(New York) Just when his most recent presidential campaign seemed doomed to the same humiliating failure as the two previous ones, Joe Biden set out to tell a story that could stir the black voters who would save him.
“30 years ago to the day, Nelson Mandela came out of prison and started discussions on apartheid,” he recalled on February 11, 2020 during a rally in South Carolina. “I had the great honor of being stopped with our UN Ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to see him on Robben Island. »
The future president told the story at least three times in February 2020. But Andrew Young, US ambassador to the UN from 1977 to 1979, told media that he had no recollection of any such arrest.
It was not the first time that Joe Biden gave himself the beautiful role in the fight of blacks against racism.
Barely a year ago, Joe Biden bragged for the umpteenth time about being arrested during the civil rights protests of the 1960s.
“I feel like yesterday was the first time I was arrested,” he told black students in Atlanta.
No one has managed to confirm a single one of the arrests with which Joe Biden has peppered his speeches over the years.
Newcomer
These days America is getting to know a serial fabricator, George Santos, who was elected to the House of Representatives in a New York constituency after lying about almost every aspect of his life, including his college career, his professional experiences and his religious heritage. He also falsely claimed that his mother died in the collapse of one of the World Trade Center towers.
PHOTO EVELYN HOCKSTEIN, REUTERS ARCHIVES
Republican Representative George Santos, elected last November
Democrats, as well as some Republican leaders in New York, have called for the resignation of Santos, whose financial statements as a candidate could also land him in trouble with the law. But several conservative commentators took the opportunity to argue that “Santos must have learned from Biden how to make up details about his past,” to quote one.
Christian Hart, co-author of Pathological Lyinga book published last September, and Big Liarswhich will be released next August, does not minimize the lies of Joe Biden.
“The invention of stories with far-reaching consequences about his past certainly falls into this category of big lies that we talk about in [Big Liars] says the professor of psychology at Texas Woman’s University, where he directs the Human Deception Laboratory.
Nothing new
The recent examples mentioned in the beginning of this article demonstrate that Joe Biden has not turned his back on the fabrications that helped to torpedo his first presidential campaign in 1988. He then invented coal miner ancestors by plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, leader of Britain’s Labor Party, while falsely claiming to be the first member of his family to attend university.
During this same campaign, he also boasted of having won three university degrees, finished in the “first half” of his class at law school and benefited from a “full scholarship”. None of this was true.
In an article published last October, the New York Times recalled these inventions, while providing more recent examples. The same month, speaking to victims of the hurricane Ian, Florida, Joe Biden says lightning nearly destroyed his home 15 years ago. A week earlier, speaking of Puerto Rico, an island devastated by hurricanes, he said he was “raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically”. None of this corresponds to reality.
Another example: in 2019, Joe Biden recounted having traveled to Afghanistan to present a military decoration to a soldier who had recovered the body of another American fighter from an 18-meter ravine. The truth ? The soldier was decorated at the White House by Barack Obama.
But it seems far away, the time when Joe Biden had to pay for his fabrications. Political tribalism partly explains the phenomenon, according to Christian Hart.
“That’s why many Republicans still say they’ll vote for Donald Trump, even though he’s also a serial liar. What he brought to them was much more important than any inconvenience related to lies,” says the psychology professor.
“In the case of Biden, I would argue that the reason he is still viewed favorably, despite his outright lies, is because they cause no obvious and direct harm to the people. He is only trying to raise his own status or esteem among the people. »
And George Santos? Has American political history known a greater storyteller?
“No,” replies Christian Hart, whose forthcoming book is particularly interested in the great liars of politics. “I get asked how he compares to Donald Trump. I would say Donald Trump is more of a bullshitter than a liar. We believe that liars are very adept at manipulating the truth in a way to show off, while he didn’t seem to care if what he said was a truth or a lie. He was just saying whatever suited him, whether it was a lie or a truth. »
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