President Biden offered a stony-hearted “No comment” Sunday when asked about the mounting death toll in the catastrophic Maui wildfire — the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century — after sunning himself on a beach near his Delaware home.
The 80-year-old commander-in-chief gave the unsympathetic non-answer as the death toll climbed to 96 late Sunday.
“After a couple hours on the Rehoboth beach, @potus was asked about the rising death toll in Hawaii,” Bloomberg reporter Justin Sink wrote on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
“‘No comment,’ he said before heading home,” added the White House correspondent, who also posted a photo of Biden, 80, lounging with a group of people in the distance.
Biden again avoided reporters returning to Washington on Monday morning.
After the president’s Marine One helicopter landed, he walked across the White House lawn to the Oval Office without approaching the press to give a statement on the tragedy, as US leaders often do.
Biden returned to the nation’s capital amid an intensifying scandal involving his alleged role in son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings in countries such as China and Ukraine.
The grim tally in Hawaii — which is expected to rise as search and rescue operations frantically continue — made the inferno the state’s worst natural disaster.
It is also the deadliest US wildfire since 1918, when 453 people died in the Cloquet fire in Minnesota and Wisconsin, according to data from the National Fire Protection Association.
During a bike ride earlier Sunday, Biden gave a similar unfeeling answer when asked about the tragedy.
“We’re looking at it,” he said.
Biden last week declared a major disaster on Maui, pledging that the federal response will ensure that “anyone who’s lost a loved one, or whose home has been damaged or destroyed, is going to get help immediately.”
But the president’s tepid responses Sunday garnered quick backlash, with some comparing them to his response to the toxic spill unleashed by a train derailment near East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this year.
“Biden doesn’t give AF (a f–k) about the suffering people of Maui,” tweeted Monica Crowley, former US Treasury Department assistant secretary for public affairs during the Trump administration.
“Or the suffering people of East Palestine, Ohio. Or the suffering people in border towns. Or the suffering people anywhere in America,” she added.
Republican Kari Lake, who lost her 2022 bid to be Arizona’s governor, also ripped the commander-in-chief.
“One of the most beautiful places on earth has been reduced to cinders. In Delaware: @JoeBiden can’t be bothered to care. Putting America First means getting this joker out of the White House,” Lake wrote on X.
The president “rode his bike to the beach while the people of Lahaina, Hawaii dug through the ashes of their shattered community. And Nero fiddled while Rome burned,” she added.
Stephen Miller, an editor at conservative outlet the Spectator, tweeted that Biden “just came back from a 14-day beach vacation. Spent 4 days in DC, now is back on the beach and has no comment for wildfires that wiped out entire communities. Just incredible stuff.”
Another furious commentator compared Biden’s response to the war in Ukraine.
“Biden in a nutshell. East Palestine: No comment. Maui: No comment. Ukraine: send them another 24 billion,” the X user wrote.
The Post has reached out to the White House for comment.
