I want you to imagine for a moment that today, while leaving your house or walking down the street, a television reporter with a camera crew appears and unexpectedly asks, “Any comment on the rising death toll in Maui?”
You might stammer or be much less articulate than you usually are, or would like to be. But there’s a very good chance that even if taken by surprise, you would say something like, “Oh, I feel so terrible for those people. They’ve all lost so much. I’ll be praying for them,” or something along those lines.
It’s not a terribly hard question. It’s not asking you to describe, in detail, what should be done as part of the disaster recovery. It’s not algebra. All the television interviewer and the audience watching would be expecting is some expression of sympathy for the people of Hawaii who have lost their homes and their loved ones.
And yet, when a reporter shouted this question to Biden while he was staying at his home at Rehoboth Beach, Del., Biden answered, “No comment.” And then Biden offered an awkward smile and got into his Secret Service vehicle.
Besides being tone-deaf and insensitive and callous, that’s . . . just weird, isn’t it? Again, it’s not a hard question. It’s not asking for specifics. All Biden had to say was something along the lines of “I feel so terrible for those people, I’m praying for them, and we’ll have an update for you soon.” Instead, President Empathy — you know, the guy who initially instructed his staff to say he had six grandchildren and not seven — blew off the question.
Two years ago tomorrow, I wrote about what we knew of the president’s schedule, during those key days when the Taliban was reconquering Afghanistan.
After making no public appearances for four days — during a major foreign crisis — President Biden read a 20-minute speech off a teleprompter on Monday afternoon and took no questions. He immediately returned to Camp David. He had no events on his schedule Tuesday. On Wednesday, he gave another 20-minute speech about vaccine boosters off a teleprompter from Camp David, and again took no questions. Also on Wednesday, the president sat for an on-camera interview with George Stephanopoulos that did not go well. According to the White House public records, Biden has had two phone conversations with foreign leaders in the past ten days — one with Boris Johnson and one with Angela Merkel.
As of this writing, Biden has no public events on his schedule for today. He is scheduled to receive the president’s daily briefing from the intelligence community and meet with his national-security team. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, he is scheduled to return to his house in Delaware today.
That piece was titled “Something Is Wrong with the President.”
There is still something wrong with the president. No commander in chief with a fully functioning cranium refuses to answer a softball question like, “Any comment on the rising death toll in Maui?” Biden is still maintaining an exceptionally light schedule, with rarely more than one public event per day, and exceptionally few sit-down interviews. When Biden speaks off the cuff, he mumbles, rambles, his sentences and thoughts meander from one point to another. As the New York Times confirmed, Biden’s staff schedules most of his public appearances between noon and 4 p.m. and leave him alone on weekends as much as possible. His staff tries to minimize the numbers of stairs he must ascend or descend.
We’re all supposed to pretend we don’t see it, I guess.