Republican and Democrat presidents alike typically get criticized for the amount of time they spend on vacation or the golf course.
Yet say what you will about Presidents Barak Obama and Donald Trump, if they were ever asked publicly about why they hadn’t made a visit to the scene of say, a mass humanitarian crisis of their own making, there was good chance they would have had a lightning-quick answer that could pass for something resembling a valid excuse.
Not so much for President Joe Biden, bless his heart.
No, even when pressed on his failings by CNN’s kid gloves, he couldn’t come up with a reason why he hasn’t made the short trip down south to visit the border where there is, in fact, a mass humanitarian crisis of his own making. He could only come up with the hollow excuse that he’s been “busy.”
Busy running the country so well, presumably.
Thursday night's town hall with Anderson Cooper was the predictable fiasco for the awkwardly incoherent Biden, who struggled with a number of issues, such as completing sentences, remembering what he was doing, and standing like a normal human being.
I mean seriously, what is going on here?
— Clown World Today
(@cwt_news) October 22, 2021
Meanwhile, when Biden was asked about whether he has plans to visit the southern border, which has been experiencing an influx of migrants throughout the whole of his presidency, the president, unsurprisingly, floundered.
"I’ve been there before, I haven’t, I mean, uh, I know it well,” he articulately began.
“I guess I should go down,” he continued (ya think?), “but the whole point of it is I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down."
"I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion damage done by hurricanes and floods and weather and traveling around the world," he attempted.
BIDEN ON THE BORDER: "I guess I should go down, but the whole point of it is I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down. I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion damage done by hurricanes and floods and weather and traveling around the world." pic.twitter.com/mgWLxvf36d
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) October 22, 2021
“Now my wife Jill has been down,” Biden continued, brightening. He then gave a general description of Dr. Jill Biden’s visit to the border. FLOTUS saves the day yet again.
Ironically, Biden continued to claim that “you’re not seeing kids with what look like tarps over them,” a rather ironic possible reference to the notorious “kids in cages” photo that lit social media aflame back in 2018, which turned out to have been taken during the Obama -- not Trump -- administration.
That is, the administration in which Biden served as Vice President.
“But there’s much more to be done,” he continued, circling back to the whole reason that he was being asked about the dang border in the first place. Yes, thank you, Mr. President, that’s sort of what the country is looking to you for, and why the guy with the microphone on the stage with the bright lights was asking you about when you're going to visit said border.
This is, in short, pathetic. A flight to El Paso, Texas, from Washington, D.C., is roughly four hours -- not even half a day.
It would take Biden, like, one single day to travel down to a border town, make some comments with local politicians whose name he’d assuredly forget, visit a shelter, talk to reporters for the five seconds his handlers give him to field questions and go home.
He’s the President of the United States, and the crisis is mounting to the point that the mainstream media doesn’t even seem to be willing to cover for him anymore, even with all their fabricated outrage over border agents "whipping" migrants.
Biden doesn’t even have a smart-sounding reason for why he’s supposedly been so busy.
He might have cited his work on the economy, the ongoing negotiations over his Build Back Better agenda or the crisis in Afghanistan, of course, but in perhaps one of the few instances of quick thinking that Biden displayed during the town hall, Biden cited the only examples of work he’s been doing that didn’t draw to mind even more failings on his part.
Here’s the thing: Biden has puttered around the country a bit and has taken exactly one whole entire trip abroad to attend a meeting of the G7 nations in the United Kingdom — where he said he didn’t want to go home when he arrived, mind you — but he’s taken 25 trips to his home in Delaware since taking office.
This is in addition to several vacations.
And yet we're supposed to believe he's just entirely too busy to virtue signal interest in the raging border crisis?
According to a Wikipedia list of all of his presidential trips, President Biden has been to California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Texas once each; Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana and Wisconsin twice each; New York and Ohio each three times; Michigan four times and Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, respectively, six, nine and ten times.
His home in Delaware by far takes the cake, as NPR noted in August, before he observed the fall of Kabul from his vacation at Camp David.
In June, Biden skipped out on work on a Wednesday to enjoy some time off at his Rehoboth Beach estate, despite ongoing negotiations over the infrastructure bill back in the capital.
“Of the first 29 weekends of his presidency, Biden spent just six at the White House,” NPR reported at the time, explaining that Delaware is where the president feels “grounded,” pointing to his famous daily trips back to his home during his time in the Senate to be with his sons following the tragic death of his wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972.
The outlet noted that Delaware was also where he was headed for his vacation that month -- go figure.
Later in the month, he would be criticized for remaining at Camp David as Kabul fell to the Taliban, briefly heading back to Washington D.C. to address the nation and then going back to Camp David before finally cutting his vacation short because -- sigh -- national crisis and all.
In September, as Americans were still trapped in Afghanistan following the full withdrawal of U.S. troops from the nation, which was completed on Aug. 30, Biden was -- where else? -- back on vacation in Delaware yet again.
NPR compared Biden’s Delaware weekends to Presidents Bush and Reagan spending time on their Texas and California ranches to unwind from the duties of the presidency.
To be fair, it’s certainly understandable that the president would need to unwind, assuming he does so at a better time than in the midst of a national crisis.
However, in Biden’s case, his penchant for unwinding so frequently gets rather problematic. Even beyond the terrible timing of his vacations, their frequency proves that he is not only perfectly capable of and accustomed to regular travel, but he has had plenty of free time to do so since taking office.
When it comes to giving the impression that he’s been working hard, President Biden has quite an uphill battle to face.
He is regularly shuffled around by his staffers, who angrily shoo away reporters so they can set him up in front of a teleprompter so he can halfway attempt to get through a speech without fumbling or forgetting where he is.
The work being done by Biden's administration has indeed been fraught with failure, and it’s not just the border crisis: It’s Afghanistan, climbing gas prices and overreaching, authoritarian and dubiously constitutional vaccine mandates that are alienating and demoralizing the American workforce.
Yet we’re supposed to believe that the president who takes weekends off from his job and always seems to have time for a vacation, even in the middle of a complete and utter disaster like the fall of Afghanistan, doesn’t have time to visit the border?
It’s certainly not time that Biden is lacking. It’s the willingness to do his job.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
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