On Sunday, after several hours at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, a member of the press corps asked President Joe Biden about the rising death toll in Hawaii.
Bloomberg reporter Justin Sink tweeted Biden’s “no comment” response as the president left for his home in Delaware.
Considering that more than 100 people have died and the number is still 10 times that number, how challenging would it be for Biden to say something that evokes the empathy that the people of Hawaii and the country need in those brief moments as he walked across the sand from his seat? a day at the beach?
But he didn’t. We have seen this cowardly indifference before.
On an almost daily basis two years ago, 13 American soldiers died in a cluttered two-week evacuation of 125,000 people from Kabul; It took Biden more than a week to address the public about the death, and when he did so in an address to the nation, he spent all of 23 minutes strongly rejecting any criticism of his decision and hailed the effort as an “extraordinary success.” “
In fact, despite the terrorist attack that killed 13 service members at Kabul airport during a tumultuous attempt to leave the country, Biden said he “wholeheartedly” believes he made a wise decision and stubbornly rejects any judgment that he should have made that last-ditch effort by evacuating people in a “more structured way”.
He presented to the American public, as well as families, a hideous lack of empathy, compassion and indifference.
Eighteen months later, the White House continued this chilling tone when spokesman John Kirby shrugged and smiled in response to the release of the Biden administration’s report on the Afghan withdrawal and said he had not noticed any chaos. “Despite all the talk about chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from where I was sitting,” said Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications.
In February, when a Norfolk-Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, leaking thousands of gallons of hazardous chemicals into the air, soil and water of Columbiana County, Ohio, likely changing lives for at least a generation, making any public statement It took Biden as long as 18 days to make statements about the situation.
Newsweek searched 380 stories published by the White House press from the date of the crash (February 3, 2023) to February 22, 2023, a deep review that did not reveal any direct statements by Biden.
It wasn’t until Feb. 21 that Biden said anything when he finally tweeted about the derailment. Biden once again stubbornly refused to offer even a modicum of compassion. Even when pressed on when he would visit the site of the derailment and subsequent controlled burning, he said on February 27 that he had no plans to go there.
Five days later he said he would go to East Palestine in the future, but that was the last mention of this massive disaster.
In February 2020, Biden tweeted a clip of him in a moody ad filled with balmy and fuzzy scenes of him interacting with voters to rising music as he boasted that his promise as empathizer in chief would be fulfilled if voters elected him.
“Empathy matters,” he said. “Compassion matters. We must reach out to each other and heal this country, and that is what I will do as president.”
By noon on August 14, days after the wildfires broke out in Hawaii, Biden (or an adviser) tweeted: “As the people of Hawaii mourn the death and destruction in their beautiful home, we mourn with them. I said that not only do we pray with those affected, but all our possessions will be available to them.”
Less than an hour later, the White House announced that Biden would travel to Lake Tahoe for a week, leave on Friday and return on Thursday – not much different from when he decided to go to Ukraine instead of East Palestine.
When Biden was running, Trump-weary Democrats, Republicans and media outlets looking for signs of grace during the pandemic proclaimed that Biden was an empathetic carrier because he had lost his first wife and daughter early in his professional career in a car accident and had lost his son Beau to glioblastoma when he was vice president.
And yet, despite all the hype about empathy, when it comes to the people he serves, especially the working class, he has failed miserably at conveying that he feels their pain. The nation took notice, and his job approval ratings have never improved since September 2021, when voters saw him for who he really was, not who he wanted you to think he was.
Heck, he even pretended his own granddaughter didn’t exist until New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd chastised him for his callousness, and he reversed course in the Friday afternoon news dump.
On Monday afternoon, the White House defended Biden’s response, saying the president was “deeply concerned” and was sending federal aid as the nation looks to a president who has appeared emotionally distant from the wildfires, the rising death toll and the overall emotional and economic devastation .
For Biden, the chance for redemption has disappeared. At least when it comes to showing empathy, his misreading of the country’s needs as the crisis affects other Americans has gone from a one-off to behavior that sends shivers down even some of his most staunch supporters.
