Never gets old: Biden tells false ‘Joey, baby’ Amtrak story for 7th time as prez
President Biden on Friday told a story involving an Amtrak conductor who supposedly grabbed his cheeks and shouted “Joey, baby!” — despite facts contradicting the tale, which Biden has told on at least six prior occasions as president.
The amusing anecdote — in which Biden apes former Amtrak conductor Angelo Negri’s Italian-American accent — was declared “False” last year by CNN “Facts First” journalist Daniel Dale.
In some tellings, the encounter happened at the end of Biden’s eight years as vice president after he crossed 1 million miles on Air Force Two. But that version is impossible because Negri, who retired in 1992, died in May 2014.
Biden called the latest version a “true story” and said it happened early in his vice presidency before his mother died in 2010, which is equally difficult to square with facts because Biden didn’t cross 1 million miles on Air Force Two until September 2015.
“You’d get a kick out of this, Sherrod,” Biden said to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) during a speech in Ohio about manufacturing.
“I was — the Secret Service doesn’t like me taking the train because it stops too many places. And so I was riding home though to see my mom who was living with me because she was in hospice. And on a Friday, a guy named Angelo Negri, a conductor, senior conductor, walked up and said, ‘Joey, baby!’ — grabbed my cheek. I though he was gonna shoot him. He goes, ‘Joey!’ I said, ‘Ang!’ I said, ‘He’s okay, he’s a friend.’ True story.”
Biden continued: “He said, ‘What’s all this I read in the paper? You travel over a million miles on Air Force planes.'”
“Every single mile the vice president or president travels, they keep a public record of on an aircraft, an American aircraft,” Biden went on. “And he said, ‘The boys and I were at the retirement dinner up in Jersey. So we figured it out. Average 222 days a year, 36 years, total of 269 miles every day. Joey,’ — and I don’t know whether it’s true or not — he said, ‘1,200,000 miles, not counted as vice president.’ So I know a lot about trains.”
Biden usually tells the story to underscore his interest in passenger rail funding — including to promote plans for infrastructure spending and to plug his $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, which boosted Amtrak funding.
Last year, Biden alternately said it happened in “my fourth or fifth year” as vice president, “toward the end of my term” or ” seven years into” his time as vice president — rather than the latest version, which would have been within his first year in office.
The president most recently told the tale in December in Kansas City, Mo., and shared it twice in October — at the NJ Transit maintenance facility in Kearny, NJ, and in Scranton, Pa.
Biden told the story in September during an Oval Office meeting with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in June during an infrastructure speech in Wisconsin and in April 2021 at a train station in Philadelphia. He also told the story in 2020 while campaigning.
Biden, who turns 80 this year, is the oldest-ever president and his critics accuse him of being in mental decline. However, Biden has faced criticism for years about imprecise or incorrect claims. He dropped out of the 1988 Democratic presidential primary after revelations he exaggerated his academic record and plagiarized both a campaign speech and a law school paper.
