Sorry, Politico, but Taxpayer Money Is Not ‘the President’s Wallet’

Charlie earlier pointed out how off-base it was for a Twitter user to portray Governor Ron DeSantis seeking federal hurricane-relief aid as “bending the knee” to President Biden. But Politico has woven this basic idea into a ridiculous story with a ridiculous premise:

The “president’s wallet”? What on earth are they talking about? The president may carry around a wallet for ice-cream purchases that provide fodder to a media that refuses to cover him critically, but taxpayer money that has been allocated to pay for federal disaster relief is not his personal piggybank. As Charlie put it, suggesting otherwise “is grotesque and fascistic.”

Beyond the offensive idea that taxpayer money is synonymous with the “president’s wallet,” the piece dings DeSantis for hypocrisy for having opposed federal aid for Hurricane Sandy. Put aside the fact that there were good reasons to object to Sandy relief: It cost $50 billion, included money for future mitigation efforts that did not address the immediate emergency, blew past the caps set by the hard-fought debt-ceiling deal, and was not offset with cuts to the budget elsewhere. But it’s also worth understanding that if DeSantis had gone the other way, and decided not to seek federal funds, he’d be slammed even harder by the same people now calling him out for requesting money. And we don’t even have to make this a hypothetical.

During the Obama presidency, when Republican governors declined to accept stimulus money or use Obamacare to expand Medicaid, they were lambasted as cruel throughout the media, accused of putting politics before people, and even accused of effectively killing people. Everybody knows that were DeSantis to refuse aid on principled grounds, we’d see the same sort of coverage.