Fact Check: Hawaii, Ciabatta, Highways Among Things Younger Than Biden and Trump?

Claim:

The list of things that are younger than U.S. President Joe Biden and former U.S. President Donald Trump includes: Bill Clinton, India, diamonds on engagement rings, color television, the U.S. interstate highway system, Alaska and Hawaii, birth control pills, Walmart, pineapple on pizza, legal interracial marriage, calling 911, high fives, the last guillotine execution, CNN, ciabatta bread and 95% of the U.S. population.

Rating:

Mixture ( About this rating? )

What's True:

Most of the things listed are indeed "younger" than either Biden or Trump …

What's False:

… except for diamond rings and color television. India, Hawaii and Alaska are also older than them as civilizations and cultures, but politically they are more recent entities.

In July 2024, a viral TikTok video ( archived ) showed a user listing things that were allegedly younger than U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, both of whom were running for reelection:

As of this writing, the video had gained more than 18.6 million views, 3.2 million likes and 589,000 shares.

The video correctly identified the birthdays of each of the two candidates: Nov. 20, 1942, for Biden and June 14, 1946, for Trump .

We verified the claims point by point:

• Bill Clinton: Clinton, who was U.S. president from 1993 to 2001, was born on Aug. 19, 1946 , four years after Biden and two months after Trump. The claim is true.
• India: The culture and civilization of India have existed for thousands of years, a fact that makes this claim a tad outlandish. Assuming, however, that the user was referring to the country's independence from the British Empire, which was declared on Aug. 15, 1947 , the claim is true.
• Diamonds on engagement rings: While betrothal or engagement rings have existed since ancient times, the first person to add a diamond to one was Maximilian, Archduke of Austria, in 1477, according to the Cape Town Diamond Museum in South Africa. The tradition developed among wealthy European aristocrats for centuries. In the 1700s, the cost of diamonds fell following the jewels' discovery in South America, which mean a broader swath of the population began to offer diamond rings as tokens of engagement. The diamond ring became even more popular in the 1800s, after more diamonds found and mined in South Africa began to flood the market, driving costs down. So in 1938, diamond supplier De Beers hired New York City advertising agency N.W. Ayer to create a campaign to sell more diamond engagement rings. They placed diamond rings on famous hands and in movies, but their most successful campaign started in 1948, after a copywriter at the agency came up with the slogan " Diamonds Are Forever ." Invention is not popularization; for this reason, we've rated the claim false.
• Color television: Color television is younger than Biden or Trump only if we look solely at the United States. While the first public color TV became available in the U.S. in 1954, it was invented decades earlier. For example, in July 1928, a man in London demonstrated a color television in his laboratory, and presented it more widely in Glasgow that same month at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, according to Britain's Science and Media Museum . As a result, we've rated this claim false.
• The U.S. Interstate Highway System: This was the result of federal legislation passed in 1956 and signed by then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, according to the Federal Highway Administration . We rate this claim true.
• The states of Alaska and Hawaii: Once more, the people who lived on these territories and their cultures existed for centuries, if not millennia. Experts believe Polynesians arrived in the archipelago of Hawaii between 1000 and 1200, according to the U.S. National Park Service . The first humans in Alaska arrived long before, about 15,000 to 4,000 years ago , from what is now known as Asia. But if we assume that the user is referring to the dates at which those territories became U.S. states, then the claim is correct: Alaska became a state on Jan. 3, 1959 , and Hawaii received statehood a few months after that, on Aug. 21 of the same year. The only U.S. president born after these two territories became states, as of this writing, was Barack Obama ( born Aug. 4, 1961 in Honolulu). We rate this claim true.
• Birth control pills: The first oral contraceptive, patented in 1956 , received the approval of the Food and Drug Administration in 1960 . Therefore we rate the claim true.
• Walmart: The first Walmart store opened on July 2, 1962 , in Rogers, Arkansas. We rate this claim true.
• Pineapple on pizza: The first person to add pineapple to a pizza was a Greek immigrant to Canada named Sam Panopoulos, according to the BBC . He added it to his restaurant's menu in 1962. We rate the claim true.
• Legal interracial marriage: While interracial marriage became internationally protected by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 16: "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family."), the U.S. Supreme Court deemed its ban unconstitutional nearly two decades later, in 1967, with the landmark ruling Loving v. Virginia . We rate the claim true.
• Calling 911: Before 1968, people had to dial full numbers for local police, fire and medical emergencies. Two years earlier, a damning report had shown that the difficulty of finding and dialing local numbers wasted precious minutes and caused several deaths that could have been spared with a simple and quick system. We rate this claim true.
• High fives: While people had probably slapped their hands together in celebration for many years before, the first famous high five occurred on Oct. 2, 1977, at a baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros. Dodgers player Glenn Burke ran to home plate and raised his hand, fingers outstretched, at his teammate Dusty Baker, who instinctively slapped Burke's hand . The gesture did appear in popular culture before then, most notably in the 1960 Jean-Luc Godard film " Breathless " when two friends slap each other's hand as they say goodbye, but the meaning seemed different. A 1948 book titled " Dictionary of Contemporary Slang " also included the term "slap five" — the gesture of slapping two hands together, but not above the head. In every case, the evidence allows us to rate the claim true.
• The last guillotine execution: The last execution in France happened by guillotine on Sept. 10, 1977 , to Tunisian immigrant Hamida Djandoubi, who was convicted of kidnapping, torturing and murdering Elisabeth Bousquet, a young woman he'd tried to force into prostitution. In 1981 , France abolished the death penalty, and in 2007 it enshrined this abolition its Constitution. This claim is true.
• CNN: Launched in 1980 , CNN, which stands for "Cable News Network," is younger than all living U.S. presidents as of this writing. The claim is true.
• Ciabatta bread: A fairly recent Italian culinary creation, ciabatta was invented in 1982 by a baker in the Veneto — the region around Venice — named Arnaldo Cavallari. The claim is true.
• 95% of the U.S. population: Using 2023 U.S. Census data , we calculated the sum of people who would be 78 (Trump's age) and older in 2024. Assuming no deaths in the first half of 2024, we came to a result of 5.66% of the U.S. population, suggesting 94.34% of the population would be younger than Trump, the younger of the two presidential candidates. Given that these are estimated percentages and assuming that a portion of these people died from January to June 2024, this claim is fairly accurate.

Given that some claims were true and others were false, we rated the video as a whole a mixture of true and false.

Sources:

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