President Joe Biden is traveling again — and, surprise of surprises, it’s not to “the [island] where you see on television all the time,” to use his words.
According to Fox Business, the president and first lady headed west to a Lake Tahoe beach home owned by billionaire and environmental activist Tom Steyer, once a (not very serious) rival of Biden’s for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
“Biden and first lady Jill Biden arrived in Nevada on Friday for the week-long vacation after Biden hosted a summit Friday at Camp David with leaders of Japan and South Korea,” the outlet reported Saturday.
“The private home on the massive lake and tourist attraction is owned by Steyer and his wife, Kat Taylor. … The White House told the press pool that the house was not a borrowed home and was rented for fair market value.”
The president is being joined by several members of his family — including Hunter Biden, who was already in Lake Tahoe before the first couple arrived. Insert your own joke about Nevada’s lax prostitution laws here.
The visit marked the second trip the president has made to a waterfront locale in the month of August, after he previously vacationed at his beach home in Delaware.
Conspicuously, however, neither of these beach visits has been anywhere in the vicinity of Lahaina, Maui — the site of the deadliest wildfire in America in the past century.
After a couple hours on the Rehoboth beach, @potus was asked about the rising death toll in Hawaii
“No comment,” he said before heading home pic.twitter.com/Y0UmXirju9
— Justin Sink (@justinsink) August 13, 2023
According to CNN, the death toll stood at 114 as of Monday, with more than 1,000 individuals still missing.
During his vacation in Rehoboth Beach, Biden managed to make bad headlines by refusing to answer questions about the Maui wildfires, smiling as he told a reporter who asked about the rising death toll, “No comment.”
Reporters GASP as Joe Biden runs from their questions about rising count of Americans DEAD from Maui wildfire disaster to tan at the beach: “NO COMMENT!” pic.twitter.com/MHOkr2kRUz
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 14, 2023
The White House insisted that Biden wasn’t ignoring the situation, playing down the “no comment” line.
“You’ll hear from the president,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a briefing last Monday. “This is something that the president clearly is deeply concerned about.”
And, indeed, Biden issued a short statement on Sunday, saying he would “do everything in my power to help Maui recover and rebuild from this tragedy.
“And throughout our efforts, we are focused on respecting sacred lands, cultures, and traditions,” he added.
I’m assuming that statement was authored by someone else, however, considering that Biden doesn’t seem to quite know where the tragedy took place:
During his speech in Milwaukee, the president appeared to forget the name Maui, referring to the island as ‘the one where you see on television all the time.’ ?
?
— Joni Job (@jj_talking) August 16, 2023
You know, that thingy with the stuff and the tragedy malarkey. It’s on the channel a lot. Shame, really.
While Biden will be leaving the vacation home early to visit Maui (finally), the optics still aren’t stellar.
For starters, this is an $18 million mansion that the first family is lounging about in. Americans are struggling to pay bills — particularly Hawaiians who have lost everything. Biden, meanwhile, is going on a ritzy holiday in one of the most exclusive vacation hotspots in America.
And joining him is none other than Hunter Biden, a man whose millions of dollars in apparent influence-peddling income are front and center in the news when the tragedy in Lahaina isn’t. This is one time when Joe should have told Hunter to stay put at his painting studio.
Let’s not forget, either, that — according to a website aptly titled Biden Vacation Tracker — the current president has spent 317 days, or 40 percent of his presidency, on vacation, at a cost of $11.9 million to the American taxpayer.
And, as for vacationing in a time of national tragedy, this would be bad enough if it weren’t a pattern.
If there’s some kind of calamity that can be used to check off an agenda box, Biden will be whisked there in a jiffy — and proceed to talk endlessly about that agenda item. In December 2021, he traveled to Kentucky after a series of tornadoes (which he originally called a “hurricane” in a speech given before he left for the Bluegrass State) and blamed the disaster on climate change despite no evidence it was involved.
That loss of life pales in comparison to what’s happened in Maui — but in this case, severe mismanagement on the part of officials in one of the nation’s bluest states appears to be one of the reasons the fires got so out of hand. Thus, no comment, business as usual, let’s go on a few vacations, Jill.
And it’s not just natural disasters exacerbated by his allies’ incompetence that keep the president locked into vacation mode, either.
Remember the fall of Afghanistan and the botched withdrawal that followed? During the weekend in which the country fell into the hands of the Taliban, the president wouldn’t budge from a getaway at the Camp David presidential retreat until he was finally dragged back to D.C. that Monday to give an address to the American people.
Straightaway after that address, he returned to Camp David, because apparently life’s too short to cancel a vacation in the midst of a humanitarian disaster.
If this is what leadership looks like to Joe Biden, fine. Stay in Lake Tahoe. Don’t come back. Send for Vice President Kamala Harris while you’re at it, and leave the White House to the third-in-line, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Not only am I guessing at least he can remember what Maui is called, I think we can all safely say nearly anyone not involved in the Biden White House would realize the foul optics of vacationing at an $18 million lakefront manse when so many have lost so much.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
