“I used to drive a tractor trailer … I only did it for part of a summer.”

President Joe Biden went to Dakota County Technical College in Minnesota to tout the benefits of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package. Biden toured and met students in the college’s Heavy Duty Truck Technology area, and told them they were part of the next generation of workers to tackle the jobs that lie ahead.

He may have come to talk about the future, but as he spoke to a cluster of three people, Biden’s thoughts went back to the past.

“I used to drive a tractor trailer, so I know a little bit about driving big trucks,” Biden said Nov. 30.

The young man next to him said, “Awesome.” And Biden continued.

“I only did it for part of a summer, but I got my license anyway.”

When tape of that exchange appeared, the Republican National Committee’s research arm fired off a tweet.

“Joe Biden — who has been a politician for 48 years — repeats the lie that he ‘used to drive a tractor trailer,’” the RNC Research Nov. 30 tweet said. A reader asked us to take a look.

We asked the White House press office about Biden’s truck driving credentials and did not hear back.

There’s no record that he drove an 18-wheeler, the typical meaning of a tractor trailer. The closest experience he had was in 1973, when, as a senator, he rode along on a 536-mile tractor-trailer trip from Delaware to Ohio. 

Biden’s comment in Minnesota that he “only did it for part of a summer,” sounds like a reference to another experience, a summer school bus driving job Biden had when he was a law student at Syracuse University in the mid-1960s. 

At the community-college stop in Minnesota, Biden spoke of his time as a bus driver as if it were the same as driving a tractor trailer, but it is not.

Biden has talked about his truck driving experience before. He brought it up in July 2021 when he toured a Mack Truck facility in Pennsylvania. That time, he qualified his claim that he “used to drive an 18-wheeler,” noting he “got to” drive one. That would fall short of being an actual truck driver.

Our ruling

Biden said he used to drive a tractor trailer.

There is no record that he did, and his comments in the past suggest that at most, he was given the chance to drive one at some point. His reference to a summer job suggests that he was referring to his time as a bus driver, not a truck driver.

We rate this claim False.