US President Joe Biden has claimed to be able to empathize with the people of Hawaii who lost their homes as he visited the blaze-ravaged island of Maui on Monday.
"I don’t want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense, Jill and I, of what it was like to lose a home. Years ago, now, 15 years, I was in Washington doing ‘Meet the press’ […]. Lightning struck at home on a little lake outside the home, not a lake, a big pond. It hit the wire and came up underneath our home, into the […] air condition ducts. To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my 67 Corvette [car], and my cat," Biden argued.
A 2008 report by a US news agency, however, pointed out that lightning struck the Bidens’ home and caused a "small fire that was contained to the kitchen."
The media outlet added that 20 minutes after the beginning of the blaze, firefighters got the fire under control and they were able to keep the flames from spreading beyond the kitchen. The news wire did not report that Jill was trapped inside the home, adding that no one was injured in the incident.
POTUS’ remarks came after he and his wife landed on Maui earlier on Monday to be met with screams of “F*** you!” as his motorcade passed.
In this vein, many also reacted angrily to Biden’s gaffe last week, when he appeared to forget the name Maui, referring to the island in a speech in Milwaukee as “the one where you see on television all the time.”