“I hope Americans are going to start pulling their head out of the sand and seeing what’s happened to this country,” Johnson said.
For decades, President Joe Biden has marketed himself as an empathetic champion of everyday Americans. But a string of recent tragedies and his perceived lethargic responses to them appear to have caused Americans to question that image of “Middle Class Joe.”
His decision to stay at the Delaware beach this weekend and to offer just a two-word response – “no comment” – when asked to weigh on in the heartache and loss (nearly 100 confirmed dead) from the devastating wildfires in Maui, Hawaii, appears to have put the concerns on steroids.
His Maui response even has evoked comparisons to the public relations disaster that President George W. Bush faced in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and it came after several weeks of negative coverage of a brewing ethics scandal in his family that led Friday to the appointment of a Special Counsel.
“So when you talk about the President’s involvement, I think it’s the imagery picture of him sitting on the beach. And then you see the next picture,” longtime pollster Scott Rasmussen told Just the News on Monday. “You add to that the sense people don’t really know about the whistleblowers and all that’s going on. But there’s this sense that something is happening. Yes, I think there’s a cumulative effect.”
That cumulative effect began two years ago this month with the tragically botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that killed 13 U.S. troops, an issue that still was resonating in recent days when Gold Star families rebuked him for repeatedly touting his “success” in Afghanistan.