Joe Biden Tells Completely Made-Up Amtrak Story for the 12th Time as President
Editor’s Note: Our readers responded strongly to this story when it originally ran; we’re reposting it here in case you missed it.
It’s almost as if he’s just taunting us now. Except he’s President Joe Biden, so you know that’s not the case.
On Nov. 6, Biden visited his home state of Delaware to talk about the state of passenger rail in general and Amtrak in particular. (Some of you who have paid attention to the president’s tall tales may see where this going.)
During his speech, Biden emphasized how often he rode on Amtrak — and how a certain conductor was fond of reminding him of this “fact.”
“When I was vice president, I flew over a million miles on Air Force Two, but I traveled further than that on Amtrak over the years,” Biden told the audience.
“I was coming home to see my mom, and I just — she was living at this time, my dad had passed away. And I got on the train on a Friday, and I won’t get him [the Amtrak conductor] into complete trouble, I’ll just tell you his first name, but I’ll just tell you his first name. He was No. 2 in seniority at the time, Angelo,” Biden said.
“And Ang came up to me as I was walking in, and he said, ‘Joey!’ and he grabbed my cheek, and he said, ‘Joey, Baby!’” Biden continued.
“They had just published in the newspaper that I had traveled 1,200,000 miles on Air Force planes as vice president, they published that on a regular basis,” Biden said. “He said ‘Big …’ — I won’t quote him exactly — but he said, ‘Big deal, Joey!’
“And I said, ‘What’s it mean, Ang?’ And he said … you know how many miles you traveled on Amtrak?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘A million … [and] 320,000 miles.’ And I said, ‘How do you figure that?’ And he said, ‘Well, 180 days a year, almost 300 miles a day, 36 years.’”
The conductor’s name, for the record, is Angelo Negri. I didn’t even need to look it up to fill in that blank. You want to know why? Because the story has been told at least 12 times during his presidency, according to the New York Post.
And it’s 100 percent false.
So, here’s the deal: Back when this tale was being told the first few times in 2021, what CNN termed “conservative media outlets” (Fox News and Red State, in particular) had noticed some, ahem, inconsistencies. Thus did 2021-era CNN — you know, the network that still employed Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon and Jeff Zucker at that point — do a “fact check.”
And even CNN, at its leftist agitprop peak/nadir, came to this conclusion: “Biden keeps repeating a false story about an Amtrak conductor he knew.”
“Biden’s account simply does not add up,” the fact-check noted. “Biden did not reach the million-miles-flown mark as vice president until September 2015, according to his own past comments. But Negri retired from Amtrak in 1993 and died in May 2014, according to an obituary published online and in the Asbury Park Press, a New Jersey newspaper.”
The best that Lemon-Cuomo-era CNN could come up with to cover Biden’s posterior was that “Negri’s stepdaughter, Olga Betz, said Wednesday that while she can’t confirm Biden’s story, she knows for certain that he and Negri were friends.”
Oh, well. I guess we should give the guy who lied about getting arrested in apartheid South Africa trying to visit Nelson Mandela in a prison that was hundreds of miles away from where he claimed to be the benefit of the doubt then, right?
This Amtrak story has literally been proven impossible — and I don’t mean “literally” in the sense Biden is fond of using, where it really means “figuratively, but in bold, italicized 48-point font” — but it very literally cannot be true. The details of the story sometimes change a bit and become a little more vague to give the president a bit more wiggle room, but those details are still always mutually exclusive from one another in an extreme way.
Not only that, but as the Republican National Committee’s RNC Research social media account reported, Biden told this inane lie two times in less than an hour on Nov. 6:
Biden again tells the widely debunked story of an Amtrak conductor congratulating him for traveling more than a million miles as VP.
The conductor retired from Amtrak in 1993. This never happened. pic.twitter.com/seIZwOnil4
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 6, 2023
Biden — for the second time in less than an hour — repeats the widely debunked story about an Amtrak conductor congratulating him for traveling more than a million miles on Amtrak as vice president.
Except the conductor retired in 1993, making the story impossible. pic.twitter.com/fUYb5PvJCC
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 6, 2023
Now, the question is whether this is just a troll at this point. Watch “conservative media outlets” (us, Fox News, Red State) hop up and down about how the president can’t leave the memory of poor Angelo Negri alone and stop lying about him. Wash, rinse, repeat. Sit back and laugh at the “Pinocchio Joe” headlines.
However, the one thing that the Democrats need to establish for Biden to secure another term — no matter how many indictments they manage to secure against former President Donald John Trump — is that Biden is the very picture of physical vim and mental vigor.
Biden’s repeating the Negri story for the umpteenth time (especially considering it’s one of his more blatant, thoroughly impossible, and serially fact-checked falsehoods) doesn’t help that any.
At this point, the Democrats might be better off finding the remains of Negri and running him in Biden’s place. He’s a whole lot more popular, judging by how often his “Joey, baby!” story is told, and probably has as much of his cognition left.
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