More lies and smears from Biden-Harris. That's the subject of "The Riff."
Out of respect for the office of the president -- and I have served two of them -- it gives me no pleasure to make this case: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have consistently lied more than any administration I can think of.
In recent years, I've tried to describe this as cognitive dissonance, or "untruths." But the plain reality is that they keep lying.
Just yesterday, for example, President Biden and his press secretary tried to lie their way out of "the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters."
The press office tried to fudge the quote by sticking in an apostrophe after supporters, to suggest that he was only referring to a comedian, rather than the 80-something million people who have voted for Donald Trump.
But you can't get away with lies like this in the Information Age.
The official White House stenographers immediately objected to the phony editing of the official transcript that will, at some point, make its way to the National Archives. The supervisor of stenographers called it "a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices."
Well, I'd say basically it's a spoliation of Mr. Biden's integrity. There he goes again.
The other big lie yesterday came from billionaire Kamala surrogate Mark Cuban, saying: "You never see Trump around strong, intelligent women, ever" – a stupid lie from Cuban, but so far neither Biden nor Harris have disagreed with him.
You know who does disagree with him? Sarah Sanders, Susie Wiles, Kellyanne Conway, Kayleigh McEnany, Brooke Rollins, Mercy Schlapp, Linda McMahon, Elise Stefanik, Joni Ernst, Judith Pond Kudlow, and a whole endless list of strong and intelligent women working with Trump that would be way too long for this riff.
But let's move on to today's dismal jobs report, the worst in three years, where private sector jobs fell 102,000, and the past two months were revised down by 112,000 (remember the prior evaporation of 818,000 jobs?).
The only real increases came from 91,000 government and government-adjacent jobs. There are 13 million unemployed or underemployed, and, over the past twelve months, native-born workers have lost nearly 800,000 jobs while foreign-born workers gained over a million.
And, while manufacturing jobs continue their downturn, the ISM manufacturing index remains in recession.
This all brings to mind another lie, that 16 million jobs were created during the Biden-Harris administration. Kamala has repeated this a hundred times, but it's not true.
Taking out the COVID bounceback jobs, they created 6.7 million – about the same number as the Trump administration, pre-COVID.
A related lie is that they created 800,000 manufacturing jobs. But, taking out the bounceback effect, it's only 93,000 – way less than Trump's 414,000 manufacturing jobs.
In the Information Age, you just can't lie about these numbers. Everybody has access to the same government statistics.
And that brings to mind the lie that, when Biden-Harris took over in 2021, they inherited a ‘reeling,’ depression-like economy. Simply untrue.
Trump gave them a V-shaped COVID recovery. In the third quarter of 2020, the economy rebounded by 35%, followed by 4.5% in Q4, and 5.5% in the first quarter of 2021.
Then Biden-Harris issued another lie – that they inherited a major inflation rate.
Completely untrue. Trump handed over a 1.4% inflation rate.
Over and over, Biden-Harris argued that they were reducing the federal budget deficit. They made this case again and again.
But that’s another lie, with budget deficits actually running $2 trillion as far as the eye can see, according to the CBO baseline.
Again, why lie when ordinary folks can dial up their computers and get the real numbers?
Then, they lied about billionaires only paying an 8% tax rate, but they base this on a law to tax unrealized capital gains that was never actually passed by Congress.
Besides the economy, Kamala keeps saying Trump would ban abortion nationwide.
But this is a lie. Trump has rejected this idea at every opportunity, saying it is best handled by the states as per the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
Then, Kamala argues Trump would restrict access to birth control and IVF. And that is also completely false, as Trump has said at almost every campaign stop.
Then, there's the trash-talk desperate lies from Kamala.
Trump is a fascist. He is Hitler. He's racist. He was a Russian agent. He's a bigot, sexist, and on and on.
All of this is utter nonsense.
Former Trump OMB Director and Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney has written that, in all the time he spent with Trump, he never heard a single thing about Hitler.
I went to hundreds of meetings in the Oval Office and elsewhere, and never heard anything about Hitler.
The whole "threat to democracy" business that Kamala continues to push is an old threadbare argument that has no basis in reality.
Remember, it was the Biden-Harris Justice Department that weaponized lawfare against Mr. Trump and tried to throw him in jail for 750 years. It has all failed on appeal.
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Kamala is trash-talking and mudslinging to avoid talking about her failed record on the kitchen-table issues of high prices, falling real wages, an affordability crisis for homes and cars, and everyday necessities. And, of course, the massive border crisis and the crime wave that has followed it. And the world on fire in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Middle East.
Kamala broke it. Mr. Trump intends to fix it.
But the gusher of lies from President Biden and Vice President Harris shows an enormous character defect that, from Day 1, has undermined their credibility and the trust of voters.
There are four days until the election. And that's "The Riff."
This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the Nov. 1, 2024, edition of "Kudlow."
