After President Joe Biden traveled to Maui and cited his own personal history in a disastrous bid to comfort the grieving residents of the island, where at least 115 people have been declared dead from the fire that engulfed the town of Lahaina, he was blasted on social media for his colossal insensitivity.
Biden compared the fire to a small kitchen fire in his home nearly two decades ago, saying, “I don’t want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense, Jill and I, what it’s like to lose a home. 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 — the air conditioning ducts. To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my ‘67 Corvette, and my cat.” A report from the Associated Press at the time said the fire was “a small fire that was contained to the kitchen.”
“Hearing you talk about your house that had a little fire, you ‘almost lost your house and your Corvette,’ there were children that were incinerated to ash, you f***king old man, you vile human being,” one man said in a viral video.
“You’re so out of touch with the common man, you don’t even know how to speak to them,” he continued. “The only way you think you can establish commonality with them is to lie, ‘The same thing happened to you no matter what the tragedy is.’ He referenced Biden attempting to commiserate with Gold Star Moms who lost their son in action by citing his son Beau’s death from brain cancer: “Your son wasn’t killed in action, by the way,” adding furiously, “Your house didn’t burn down. Your children weren’t burned to death.”
“How dare you get up there and speak this way?” he snapped. “Your job is to go there and assuage them in a way that you talk to them about their loss, that you can’t imagine what it’s like, that you can’t imagine what it’s like never to find the bodies of the poor children who were sent home from schools. They died alone! Alone. In fear. Without their parents or guardian. The most abhorrent thing happened. You’re a disgusting, despicable bastard.”
“You ‘almost lost your cat?’ Go f*** yourself,” he concluded.