Biden’s Misleading State of the Union: Hamas Casualty Figures, Inflated Jobs Numbers, and Dobbs Distortions

President Biden trotted out a series of misleading claims, old and new, during his State of the Union address on Thursday, parroting Hamas casualty figures, misrepresenting the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and its consequences, and inflating his job-creation record.

The address offered Biden a rare opportunity to address the American people as he seeks to boost his abysmal 39.2 percent approval rating ahead of the November election. Biden’s aides have long preferred to hide the president away, lest he make public gaffes. Still, Americans’ concern over the president’s age are at an all-time high after special counsel Robert Hur’s report last month described the 81-year-old president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and suggested he could not recall when his son Beau had died, even within several years.

The president devoted himself to changing that perception by raising his voice and lashing out at Republicans throughout his campaign-style speech.

Biden focused a significant portion of his speech on the importance of the United States’ role in the war in Gaza, but missed an opportunity to voice unequivocal support for Israel by parroting Hamas casualty figures.

While he acknowledged Israel “has a right to go after Hamas,” he misleadingly claimed the Jewish State’s war on the terrorist group has “taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined,” citing dubious figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry.

“More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas,” Biden claimed. “Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children.”

The casualty numbers produced by Hamas have not been independently verified and show clear signs of manipulation, according to a fact check by Abraham Wyner, a statistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, who explained that the daily casualty figures released by the terror group could not occur naturally, nor could their breakdowns of the number of women and children killed and injured each day.

The agency’s own numbers give this away: the regularity in the day-to-day death tolls is “almost surely not real,” Wyner explains. 

Still, Biden extolled the importance of Israel protecting and saving civilian lives and allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza.

He also announced he is directing the U.S. military to lead an “emergency mission” to establish a temporary pier on the Gaza coast to receive large ships carrying humanitarian aid.

The conflict in Gaza loomed heavy over Biden on Thursday, as he arrived late to the Capitol to deliver his address because a crowd of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered on Pennsylvania Avenue to block the presidential motorcade on its expected path. Dozens of protesters staged a sit-in at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Constitution Ave NW, shouting “free Palestine” and waving signs that read “Genocide Joe,” “Biden’s Legacy is Genocide,” and “The People Demand Stop Arming Israel,” according to The Hill.

While circumstances forced Biden to address the Israel-Hamas war, he freely chose to spend significant time on what Democrats have viewed as their big advantage since the overturn of Roe v. Wade: the party’s fight for so-called abortion rights.

“Clearly those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women in America,” Biden said on Thursday night. “But they found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot and won in 2022, 2023, and they will find out again in 2024. If Americans send me a Congress that supports the right to choose I promise you: I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.”

Many pro-abortion lawmakers arrived at the State of the Union wearing white in an apparent show of support for reproductive rights, while other lawmakers wore blue to support Israeli hostages who have been held in Gaza for five months now by Hamas terrorists.

Biden, for his part, falsely linked the Dobbs decision to the recent Alabama supreme court ruling in LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, which classified embryos as children based on a 19th-century wrongful death statute.

Biden falsely claimed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs paved the way for the Alabama court’s ruling.

There are several problems with Biden’s reasoning, as NR has previously explained: the Court never read Roe to protect IVF from regulation or restriction; state and federal laws and court decisions recognizing human embryos and human fetuses as persons for some legal purposes preceded Dobbs, and courts did not strike them down as inconsistent with Roe; and the Alabama decision itself says that the state’s wrongful-death law covered unborn children in the womb before Dobbs.

Immigration, meanwhile, has emerged as a key issue for voters. Biden’s address came hours after the House passed a bill in honor of Laken Riley, the Georgia nursing student who was slain last month by an illegal immigrant.

The bill would require federal immigration authorities to detain illegal immigrants charged with local theft or burglary and would also allow states to sue the federal government “if an immigration related action harms the state or its citizens.”

The passage of the Laken Riley Act in a 251-170 vote comes weeks after Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela was charged in the 22-year-old’s murder on the University of Georgia campus.

Ibarra, who illegally entered the country in September 2022 and was released into the U.S. via parole, was arrested in New York City in September 2023 for acting in a manner to injure a child under 17, but he was released by local police before a detainer could be issued. One month later, he was cited in Georgia for misdemeanor shoplifting alongside his brother, Diego Ibarra, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Biden on Thursday attempted to shift the blame on for the immigration crisis onto Republicans, saying they have refused to work on a bipartisan basis in Congress to advance immigration legislation.

It is true that Senate Republicans voted against the bipartisan bill earlier this month, though opponents said it would normalize high levels of illegal immigration, and Biden elided the fact that his decision to rescind several Trump-era executive orders played a role in exacerbating the border crisis.

Biden also repeated a distortion that has been fact-checked by numerous sources time and time again, that a record-setting 15 million new jobs were created in just three years under his administration.

Biden’s claim ignores the unprecedented job losses that occurred before he took office as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic; the economy lost nearly 22 million jobs in March and April 2020. Therefore, the jobs filled under Biden were more the product of job recovery in the wake of unprecedented loss rather than record-setting job creation.

Furthermore, Philip Klein refutes Biden’s claims that he has “already cut the federal deficit by over $1 trillion”:

Biden tried once again to claim to be a deficit cutter. But he uses as his comparison the inflated peak Covid spending levels. Had he done nothing, they were expected to go down. In reality, Biden actually added to the problem. Deficits have been $1.6 trillion higher than what the CBO projected for the past three years. When he took office, CBO projected the 2023 deficit would be $963 billion. It was $1.7 trillion.

Finally, the president accused “many of my Republican friends” of wanting to “put Social Security on the chopping block.” This despite the leader of the GOP, President Trump, having warned Republicans last year not to “cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security” when they began negotiations with Biden and Democrats over a measure to raise the debt ceiling.

Even Nikki Haley, who earned criticism from Trump over her calls for entitlement reform, has called only to raise the retirement age, not to put social security on the chopping block.