President Joe Biden was caught trying too hard to please Wisconsin voters when he told an apparently false story about a teacher at his Delaware Catholic high school being recruited by the Green Bay Packers.
‘My theology teacher at the Catholic school I attended was a guy called Reilley, last name. And he had been drafted by the Green Bay Packers,” Biden said during a speech in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, on Wednesday.
And before that he decided to become a priest, so he didn’t go. But every single Monday that he won Green Bay, we had the last period of the day off,” Biden said.
The phrase was first flagged as a possible Ron Burgundy moment by online users who wondered why the president said “last name.”
But online sleuths quickly searched online for Green Bay Packers draft records dating back to the 1930s, with neither Rileys nor Reilleys apparently having been drafted.
Biden called an audible in Wisconsin and told a story about a theology teacher at his Catholic school who he said was recruited by the Green Bay Packers. No such records were immediately available, and a few years ago he told a different version of the story.
‘Now, we Catholics call that indirect bribery. But it worked,” Biden said, drawing laughter in the Rust Belt state with many working-class Catholic residents.
Adding to the mystery, Biden told a different story in 2021 about a Diny father who instilled a lifelong love of the Packers in Biden, who lived in Delaware and Pennsylvania during his youth.
“I went to a Catholic boys’ school in Claymont, Delaware, where I was taught by an order of priests called Norbertines,” he said. he told WTMJ at that time. ‘The Norbertines had their Abbey house in DePere.
‘Every Sunday the Packers won, the principal… Father Justin E. Diny would get on the public address system and say, “Gentlemen, there is no last period today.”
“He turned us all into Packers fans. Plus, I’m afraid I’m going to hell if I don’t support the Packers. Father Diny can return. I can’t go against Father Diny. He’ll come out of his grave if he knew I was rooting for someone else.
Diny is listed as a former director of Archmere Academywhere Biden played high school football.
The only Reilly in the club’s history was recruited in 1947 and became an Air Force general, the New York Post reported.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the apparent discrepancies. But an official White House transcript released Wednesday afternoon included the spelling ‘Reilley’ in the middle of Biden’s comments.
The botched move came as Biden rampaged through battleground Wisconsin, where he destroyed a planned $10 billion factory that was once touted by Donald Trump as a “scam” and ridiculed his predecessor for pushing it.
He ridiculed Trump in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, for applauding the massive factory project in Racine and declaring it the “eighth wonder of the world,” while announcing a new Microsoft facility that would serve as an artificial intelligence data center on the same site.
‘He and his administration promised a $10 billion investment by Foxconn to build a new manufacturing complex and create 13,000 new jobs. In fact, he came here with Senator Ron Johnson, literally holding a golden shovel, promising to build the eighth wonder of the world. Are you kidding me?’ Biden asked, earning laughter from a crowd of supporters.
‘Look what happened. They dug a hole with those golden shovels… and then they fell into it.
Look, they didn’t shovel other dirt, they did shovel some dirt. 100 houses were demolished. They wasted hundreds of millions of dollars of your state and local taxes to promise a project that never came to fruition. Foxconn turned out to be precisely a scam.
“Imagine,” he said.
Trump had announced the plan with great fanfare in 2017 as part of his ‘America First’ agenda, but the Taiwanese firm reduced it drastically a few years later, citing “market fluctuations.”
Trump leads Biden in the battleground state by half a percentage point in the latest RealClearPolitics average, in a state that Trump won in 2016 but that Biden took from him in 2020.
Trump praised the planned investment as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”
Biden attacked his rival in a state where Trump has a narrow lead in the polls
Biden later met with campaign volunteers at the Dr. John Bryant Community Center.
Biden took selfies with campaign volunteers as his re-election effort announced it was expanding, fueled by his repeated cash grabs.
In Wisconsin, as in battlegrounds Michigan and Pennsylvania, Biden suffers from diminished youth support, concerns about maintaining the support of Black voters he enjoyed in 2020 and divisions over Israel’s war in Gaza.
He plans to meet with volunteers as his campaign, which is ramping up staff and offices, announced a new $14 million ad buy.
Now Microsoft is promising 2,300 union construction jobs and a similar number of permanent jobs to run a data center there.
Microsoft President Brad Smith told the AP that the company had a “steadfast commitment to under-promising and over-delivering” and praised the Biden administration for its role. Wisconsin Rep. Bryan Steil (R) said Biden doesn’t want to talk about his inflation policies.