Yes, that’s why I prefaced my comment with “technically.” To claim Biden grew the deficit, you would have to explain that COVID was some sort of exception and then argue that it still grew in spirit (rather than technically).

Although without COVID Trump was definitely still on track to have significantly raised the deficit since it was falling in most years under Obama compared to 2008/2009 (before COVID he grew the deficit significantly with his first round of tax cuts, just like he just did with the big beautiful bill), and it isn’t clear that Biden would have diverged from Obama without COVID around.