Biden Stumbles Through South Carolina Speech: Teleprompter Battles, Hudson River Confusion, and False Deficit Claims

On July 6, 2023, President Joe Biden traveled to West Columbia, South Carolina, to tour the Flex LTD manufacturing facility and announce a new “clean energy” partnership between solar firm Enphase Energy and Flex. What was supposed to be a showcase for his “Bidenomics” economic agenda instead became a compilation of verbal stumbles, geographical confusion, misleading economic claims, and a losing battle with his own teleprompter.

The Podium Struggle

Biden’s difficulties began before he even started his prepared remarks. Upon taking the stage, he struggled visibly with the mechanics of his podium setup, narrating his confusion to the audience.

“Hello, South Carolina!” Biden said. “Thank you, Nikki, for that intro — if you wonder what I’m kicking here, I’m kicking this stand-in. But it’s not working. How about that? All right, maybe I stand on it and give my — I’ll be 6’4”.”

The President then recycled an anecdote he had told at multiple previous events: “By the way, if you have seats, sit down. I’m sorry. I once said, ‘Everybody take a seat,’ and there were no seats. They said, ‘Biden is so stupid, he didn’t know there were no seats.’”

The repeated joke — delivered as though it were a spontaneous aside — had appeared in Biden speeches throughout 2023, raising questions about how much of his seemingly off-the-cuff commentary was itself scripted.

Battling the Teleprompter

The centerpiece of Biden’s visit was supposed to be the announcement about lithium processing for electric vehicle batteries. Instead, the passage became a showcase of the President’s struggle to read and deliver his prepared text coherently.

Biden said: “Process lithium for electric vehicle batteries. That’s — not only will create 3,000 — 300 permanent jobs, but it’ll left up a whole community — a whole community — restore some pride. It matters. The lithium will power components like our — like the — like — it’s going to be taking — being made in Redwood Minerals — excuse me — Redwood Materials near Charleston, where the company is making the largest investment in the state of — in the history of this state.”

In the span of a single paragraph, Biden initially said “3,000” before correcting to “300” jobs, said “left up” instead of “lift up,” stumbled through four false starts trying to describe what the lithium would power, confused the company name “Redwood Materials” with “Redwood Minerals,” and lost his place mid-sentence when trying to describe the scale of the investment.

Telling South Carolinians About the Hudson River

In one of the speech’s most confusing moments, Biden began telling his South Carolina audience about infrastructure projects in New York — apparently reading from a teleprompter segment intended for a different venue or context.

“And today, in New York, we’re investing a record — a billion dollars to renew the Hudson Tunnel,” Biden said. “You walk through that tunnel, it was built 100 years ago. It’s falling apart. You’ll be able to go through it 100 miles an hour instead of 30 miles an hour.”

The reference to going “100 miles an hour” through a tunnel was itself a peculiar claim. The Hudson River tunnels carry Amtrak and NJ Transit rail traffic between New Jersey and Manhattan’s Penn Station. While the tunnels were indeed over a century old and in need of repair, the suggestion that commuters would be traveling through them at 100 mph bore little relation to the actual rail speeds planned for the corridor.

More fundamentally, a South Carolina audience hearing about New York tunnel renovations raised the question of whether Biden was reading remarks tailored for his actual audience or simply cycling through a general infrastructure script.

The $1.7 Trillion Deficit Claim

Biden then shifted to his signature economic claim, delivered in his characteristic stage whisper for emphasis.

“The so-called Inflation Reduction Act I wrote — we wrote and passed. Well, that’s the legislation that passed where so much money is coming in to make all this happen. And, by the way, parenthetically, I want you to — you’re going to hear about the deficit — I cut the deficit $1.7 trillion in two years. Nobody has ever done that. Cut the debt 1.7.”

The claim was misleading on multiple levels. The deficit reduction Biden cited was overwhelmingly the result of temporary COVID-19 emergency spending expiring on schedule, not the result of any Biden policy. The Congressional Budget Office had projected massive deficit reductions before Biden signed a single piece of legislation, simply because the trillions of dollars in pandemic relief passed in 2020 and early 2021 were designed to be temporary.

Biden also appeared to conflate “deficit” and “debt” mid-sentence, saying “cut the debt 1.7” — a significantly different claim, since the national debt had actually increased substantially under his presidency. The switch from “deficit” to “debt” suggested either a teleprompter error or a confusion between the two concepts.

The Bidenomics Pitch

Biden attempted to brand his economic agenda with an optimistic framing, acknowledging that the term “Bidenomics” had not originally been intended as a compliment.

“The Wall Street Journal to the Financial Times called the program ‘Bidenomics.’ I’m not sure they meant it as a compliment at the time,” Biden said. “Our plan is working.”

He then touted wage growth: “Twenty years high — higher than every single one of my predecessors. And to pay for low-wage workers — the pay for low-wage workers has grown at the fastest pace in two decades. And, folks, it’s no accident. It’s Bidenomics in action.”

The wage claims omitted the critical context that real wages — wages adjusted for inflation — had fallen during much of Biden’s presidency. While nominal wage growth was positive, the inflation that accompanied it meant workers’ purchasing power had actually declined. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed that real average weekly earnings had decreased in 14 of the first 18 months following the passage of the American Rescue Plan.

The Supply Chain Admission

In a candid moment, Biden suggested that the concept of supply chains was unfamiliar to him until relatively recently.

“Before the pandemic, supply chains weren’t something most Americans thought about,” Biden said. “If I said to you six years ago, ‘We’re worried about a supply chain,’ you’d look at me like, ‘Huh?’ Well, I would have looked at you the same way.”

The admission that a career politician with decades of Senate experience and eight years as Vice President would have been unfamiliar with the concept of supply chains as recently as 2017 was striking. Supply chain management had been a central topic in economics and international trade for decades before the pandemic made the term part of everyday vocabulary.

Attacking Republicans

Biden closed by criticizing Republicans for opposing the Inflation Reduction Act while accepting its benefits in their districts.

“Every Republican member of the Congress voted against the Inflation Reduction Act. Every one,” Biden said. “That hasn’t stopped them, though, from claiming credit now that billions of dollars and thousands of jobs are coming to the United States. It’s not unusual.”

Key Takeaways

• Biden struggled with his podium setup, recycled a well-worn joke, and battled his teleprompter throughout a South Carolina speech announcing a clean energy manufacturing partnership.
• In his most notable gaffe, he told a South Carolina audience they could go “100 MPH instead of 30 MPH” through the Hudson River tunnel in New York — a claim unrelated to his audience and inaccurate on the speed projections.
• Biden repeated his misleading claim of cutting the deficit by $1.7 trillion, which was overwhelmingly attributable to the expiration of temporary COVID-era spending rather than his policies.
• He admitted he would not have known what a “supply chain” was six years prior, despite decades of experience in government.
• Biden touted nominal wage growth while omitting that real wages adjusted for inflation had declined during much of his presidency.