Biden Insults Maui Wildfire Victims in Desperate Attempt to Be Relatable with Exaggerated Story About Losing His Home
When your loony grandpa turns every Thanksgiving dinner discussion into some sort of harebrained anecdote from his past, it’s an endearing trait you’ve grown to love.
When the President of the United States turns every national tragedy into a harebrained anecdote from his past… it’s not nearly as endearing.
And for anyone who’s been remotely following President Joe Biden’s exploits over the past several years, you already know where this is going.
Biden finally mustered the effort to show his face in Hawaii weeks after devastating wildfires effectively razed the beachfront town of Lahaina, claiming over a hundred lives.
It’s the sort of effort you’d expect from a college student procrastinating on a term paper — not POTUS following such a deadly tragedy.
Somehow, some way, Biden actually made things worse when he did arrive by insultingly trying to turn these tragedies into Grandpa Joe Story Time.
Here’s one particularly contemptible example from Biden’s overdue visit to Maui:
Biden says “Jill and I have a little sense of what it’s like to lose a home” and then tells the story of when lightning struck his house in 2004 and says “I almost lost my ’67 corvette and my cat.”
According to a report from the time, the lighting strike caused “a small fire… pic.twitter.com/V8IBfoZuEW
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 22, 2023
As Biden addressed the scores of unhappy local Hawaiians, the president, perhaps in an ill-advised attempt to seem relatable, dredged up an old incident from his past.
It would’ve been a perfectly relatable and human moment for Biden — if only the story were remotely as harrowing as he made it out to be.
“I don’t want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense, Jill and I, of what it’s like to lose a home,” Biden said.
(If Biden were actually trying to empathize, perhaps he could, you know, offer up more than $700 to Hawaiian families the same day he sent $200 million in military aid to Ukraine.)
The 80-year-old president continued: “Years ago, now, 15 years ago, I was in Washington, doing ‘Meet the Press,’ it was a sunny Sunday. And lightning struck at home, on a little lake that’s outside of our home. Not a lake, a big pond.
“And hit a wire, and came up underneath our home, into the heating ducts, air conditioning duct. To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette, and my cat.”
It’s at this point that the president begins to veer off into an elderly tangent about a fire station from his childhood.
If this near-catastrophic incident sounds at all familiar to you, it’s because Biden dredged up this exact incident back in 2022, according to the Washington Examiner.
Incidentally, Biden shared this same anecdote while addressing residents of Colorado who, coincidentally, were grappling with the aftermath of fires in early 2022.
This would all be fine and great if Biden’s story was anywhere near true.
As the Examiner noted, even back then, over a year and a half ago, this lightning story was bunk.
Citing a 2004 Associated Press report, the Examiner called out the fact that this potentially disastrous fire was a relatively simple problem that was resolved within 20 minutes and largely contained to just the kitchen.
In other words, it’s literally nothing like the abject horror and devastation that people on Maui face.
Look, there’s a time to empathize and there’s a time to sympathize.
The problem with Biden isn’t that he doesn’t know when to do what.
The problem with Biden is that he flat-out stinks at empathizing and sympathizing.
His entire treatment of the people of Hawaii has made that painfully, abundantly clear.
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