Biden tells debunked Amtrak tale boasting his rail mileage for 13th time
President Biden on Friday shared for at least the 13th time since taking office a debunked story involving a late Amtrak conductor named Angelo Negri who supposedly exclaimed “Joey, baby!” while extolling Biden’s lifetime rail ridership.
Biden, 81, gave his latest rendition of the tale — changing some details, including the specific mileage cited — while touting investments in rail infrastructure at an event in Las Vegas.
“I was vice president… I was going home to see my mom. I was catching a 5 o’clock train I used to take every single day — a 7 o’clock train out of Washington,” Biden began.
“One of the senior guys at Amtrak… He comes up to me — his name is Angelo — and he comes over and he says ‘Joey, baby!’ and grabs my cheek. I thought they were gonna shoot him.
“And I said, ‘Ang, what’s the matter?’ He said, ‘We just — I just read the newspaper’ — because they keep meticulous mileage [of] how many miles you use on aircraft for the United States Air Force as vice president,” Biden continued
“‘I read in the paper, Joey, that you traveled… one million, two hundred thousand miles on Air Force,” Biden went on, using a different figure from the million of miles he more commonly cites.
“He said, ‘Big —’ I’m gonna quote him exactly. He said, ‘Big deal, Joey.’ He said, ‘We just had a retirement dinner in Newark, New Jersey… You know how many miles you’ve ridden?’ I said, ‘No, Ang.’ And he said, ‘1,000,327 miles. I don’t hear any more about the Air Force.’ Well, guys, I — I’m a rail guy, not a joke.”
The story was rated “False” in 2021 by CNN, which noted that Biden didn’t reach one million miles aboard Air Force Two until September 2015, well after Negri’s retirement from Amtrak in 1993 and death in May 2014.
Biden’s daily private schedule as vice president included a note about how many Air Force miles he had traveled, allowing for verification.
Biden is seeking a second four-year term in next year’s election despite broad public concern about his mental acuity.
A New York Times poll last month found 71% of swing-state voters believe Biden is “too old to be an effective president,” versus 39% who said so of former President Donald Trump, 77, who is seeking a rematch against Biden.
Biden also has a decades-long propensity for embellishing personal stories and was forced to drop out of his first presidential bid in 1987 due to plagiarism of speeches, a law school paper and exaggerations about his academic record.
