It should’ve been the easiest thing in the world for staff to set up a podium at the beach this weekend for President Joe Biden to offer some heartfelt sympathy for the victims and survivors of the horrific Maui wildfire.
Instead, all America got was a stony presidential “no comment” reply late Sunday to a reporter’s question on the ever-rising death toll (then already 93), following an afternoon Biden had spent schmoozing, picnicking and lounging at his Rehoboth beach refuge.
Asked earlier that day about a visit to the disaster area, he’d given a curt “We’re looking at it,” which followed White House noise about not wanting to get in the way on-site.
This, to what’s already the deadliest US fire toll in over a century.
And following his failure to show at East Palestine, Ohio after the horror there in the spring.
Even after exiting his chopper back in DC on Monday, he offered nothing — though, again, setting up a podium for some fast remarks would’ve been 15 minutes’ work.
If his staff is that afraid of letting him speak spontaneously in front of a few cameras, his foot-in-mouth disease is even worse than we’d thought.
Only later on Monday did Team Biden finally get around to offering a substantive, sympathetic comment on the nightmare.
Via X (ex-Twitter).
A guy famed for his supposed empathy couldn’t offer more than six heartless words total on a terrible tragedy — not as long as he was on vacation.
(In all, he’d been two weeks at the beach, with four days scattered back at the White House.)
Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, spent the weekend at a $10,000-per-ticket fundraiser in Martha’s Vineyard.
Two takeaways:
- Biden’s “empathy” is fake: a shtick he mastered long ago, not an actual lodestar for his actions or thoughts.
- Biden and Harris know they’ll still win the electoral votes of hyper-Democratic Hawaii come November 2024, and that’s all they really care about.
Just as with the refusal to cut New York one single break on the migrant crisis, this crew can’t be bothered to care unless its own interests are threatened.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
