Is Joe Biden a Narcissist?
President Biden has a disturbing penchant for telling untruths about himself. Is being a narcissist a prerequisite for politicians? Does it matter?
WASHINGTON – President Biden has a habit of exaggerating, or inventing, his personal experiences in awkward attempts to connect with the public. He often portrays himself as a blue-collar guy, just “Regular Joe,” who empathizes with the struggles of the ordinary American. But the truth is Joe Biden hasn’t been an “ordinary American” for more than 50 years—spending the last half-century at the pinnacle of political power in Washington.
Well, he’s been at it again, telling false stories putting him at the center of some national or international event, at the forefront of some social or political movement, or in the same place with those he is attempting to connect with.
If you thought Burger King was the Home of the Whopper, it just might be the White House instead. In yesterday’s Sunday edition, the New York Times published an article challenging the President’s recollection of events, his place in them, and even his own resume.
“In President Biden’s telling, he was a teenage civil rights activist, a former trucker, the first in his family to go college and the nephew of a cannibalism victim,” writes Times reporter Linda Qui. “All of these claims stretch the truth or are downright false. But Mr. Biden persists in telling personal tales with rhetorical flourishes and factual liberty when he works a room or regales an audience. They are a way to connect with voters, emphasize his ‘middle-class Joe’ persona and charm his audience.”
I’m not sure what audience the President would be trying to seduce by claiming to be related to a victim of cannibalism, but referring to them as just “rhetorical flourishes,” or taking “factual liberty,” is perhaps intentionally naive. I think most would think of them as lies.
During his speech at West Point just a few weeks ago, for example, Biden told graduating Cadets that he had received a Congressional nomination to attend the US Naval Academy, but instead chose to attend the University of Delaware. According to the Times, he has “repeatedly recounted this tale to graduating cadets at various military academies and to families of service members.”
This claim has been debunked many times, and it’s particularly disturbing because it’s an insultingly clumsy attempt at “Stolen Valor.” There’s no record, according to the Times, that the US Naval Academy ever received a Congressional nomination for Biden. Even Biden’s autobiography fails to mention it. “The New York Times,” reports Liu, “could not verify Mr. Biden’s claim.”
The President had a busy May embellishing, or outright inventing, his resume or role in pivotal societal events and issues. For example, at a NAACP event in Michigan last month, Biden again repeated his claim that he was a 15 year old civil rights activist. “As a matter of fact, the first organization I ever joined was the N.A.A.C.P.,” Biden said, “Didn’t get to vote until you were 21 in those days, but I got involved in civil rights when I was 15.”
“Over his long political career,” Qui wrote in the Times back in 2020, while fact-checking similar claims made by Biden during the Iowa Democratic Caucuses, “Mr. Biden has occasionally suggested he played a greater role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s than he actually did. While there are accounts of Mr. Biden participating in a few desegregation events, he has also said he would not consider himself an activist in the movement.” Biden has claimed to have been “arrested” at civil rights protests many times, including when he was 15, and while demonstrating against apartheid in South Africa. He wasn’t.
The President has also frequently exaggerated his academic record, saying he has three undergraduate degrees (he doesn’t), that he graduated near the top of his law school class (he graduated at the bottom), and during a guest appearance on the Howard Stern Show, also in May, Biden implied that he was accepted at Cornell Law School. There’s no record he ever was, or even applied.
This past Fall the President came under fire—not literal fire, but that might be a future tale—for not visiting one of the 9/11 attack sites, and instead giving a speech from a military base in Anchorage, Alaska. Again, he got caught embellishing his place in history. “Ground Zero in New York—I remember standing there the next day and looking at the building," Biden said during his speech, "I felt like I was looking through the gates of Hell, it looked so devastating because the way you could — from where you could stand." He didn’t actually visit the site until September 20.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan, called this “misremembrance” a “whopper.”
And speaking of coming under fire, only weeks before untruthfully putting himself on the grounds of 9/11 the morning after the attack, Biden told a room full of Maui wildfire survivors, many who had lost everything, including family members, that “I don’t want to compare difficulties,” and then proceeded to compare what the local fire department at the time called an “insignificant” fire at his home to the firestorm in Maui.
“To make a long story short,” Biden said, “I almost lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette and my cat.” But news reports at the time described it as “a small fire that was contained to the kitchen” and quoted the local Delaware fire chief as saying “the fire was under control in 20 minutes.” Reporters for the Times noted that “Mr. Biden has mentioned the incident before, once saying that he knows what it’s like ‘having had a house burn down with my wife in it.’”
Times reporters Michael D. Shear and Linda Qiu noted back in 2022, in an article titled Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel, that the “exaggerated biography that Mr. Biden tells includes having been a fierce civil rights activist who was repeatedly arrested. He has claimed to have been an award-winning student who earned three degrees. And last week, speaking on the hurricane-devastated island of Puerto Rico, he said he had been ‘raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically.’” Ay Dios Mio!
“Stories like this are so instantly checkable you wonder, again, why Mr. Biden would court embarrassment,” Noonan wrote, “It’s possible Mr. Biden has been telling these stories so long he’s become convinced they’re true. The disturbing consideration is that while repeated lying is a characterological fault, not knowing you’re lying might suggest a neurological one.”
The President’s age has become an issue in the election. Numerous polls show that a majority of Americans, not just Republicans, are concerned that the President is too old to be an effective President. One might be tempted to chalk his tall-tale-telling to a failing memory, but he has such a long history of spinning truth-challenged stories about himself that predate his Presidency that it can’t be about his age or a failing memory. It is instead part of his personality, and a tactic he uses to court and connect with voters.
All this begs the question; is Joe Biden a narcissist? Certainly, politics attracts people with narcissistic tendencies, and some psychologists and psychiatrists believe it’s part of a politician’s DNA, maybe literally. “[I]s it possible that narcissism might just be an unintended prerequisite for being a successful politician,” asked Leon F Seltzer PhD, in Psychology Today. “For to be elected to public service would seem to require a level of ambitiousness that may intimately relate to core narcissistic drives.”
Pete Hatemi, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State who studies political personalities, compared the personalities of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton following the 2016 Presidential Election. “Donald Trump is the classic vulnerable narcissist, while Hillary Clinton appears to reflect the model case for a grandiose narcissist,” Hatemi said. “One is desperate for everyone to think he is great, and his endless neurotic narcissism turns to rage when he doesn’t get the admiration he desperately desires; the other actuality thinks she is great and deserves to lead, unfazed by data that show more than half the country cannot stand her. Yet these were the persons that the public put forward to run for president.”
You might ask, why would Biden continue to make up stories about himself? Especially when every word a President utters, writes, or is attributed to them, is scrutinized and double-checked? Is it pathological?
“It’s an attempt to create a sort of picture of who he is as someone who has empathy and knowledge and connection with people who are unlike him,” Michael Blake, a professor of philosophy, public policy and governance at the University of Washington, told the New York Times. “But the problem is, when it’s verifiably a false story, at that point trust in that story, it fails.”
“I worry,” Blake continued, “about the corrosive effects on democracy.”
Read More
Joe Biden’s shifting recollection on his civil rights activities
Fact-Checking Joe Biden Before the Iowa Caucuses
Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel
Fact check: Biden falsely claims he was at Ground Zero ‘the next day’ after 9/11