evidence: When President Joe Biden passingly said in a voting rights speech last week that he had been "arrested" in the context of the civil rights movement – even suggesting this had happened more than once – it was a classic Biden false claim: an anecdote about his past for which there is no evidence, prompted by a decision to ad-lib rather than stick to a prepared text, resulting in easily avoidable questions about his honesty. [...] Biden made a series of claims about his own past that were just not true. It was these easy-to-understand, hard-to-defend personal falsehoods – more than his false claims about complex policy issues or obscure statistics, which supporters could more easily dismiss as good-faith errors – that provided the best ammunition for opponents looking to portray him as deceptive. [...] While talking in November to technical college students standing near a truck, Biden claimed, "I used to drive a tractor-trailer," though only for "part of a summer." This was similar to something he had said at a Mack Trucks facility in July, when he claimed, "I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man," adding, "I got to." There is no evidence Biden ever drove a big truck; the White House previously noted to CNN that he once had a job driving a school bus (which is not an 18-wheeler or a tractor-trailer) and that, as a senator in 1973, he spent a night riding in a cargo truck (not driving it).