Biden takes in a 6-day vacay at Tom Steyer's $18 million Lake Tahoe mansion ... with a side trip to Maui
The residents of Maui must be so thrilled to hear that Joe Biden will interrupt his regularly scheduled weeklong vacation to make a one-day side trip to their fire-ravaged island.
No wonder a lot of them are telling the press they'd rather he didn't.
The New York Post notes that this is one of many such trips he's made during his presidency:
WASHINGTON — President Biden and his extended family arrived late Friday for a weeklong Lake Tahoe vacation at the $18 million waterfront mansion of billionaire climate investor Tom Steyer.
Biden, 80, and his scandal-plagued son Hunter, 53, showed up separately to the six-bedroom Nevada retreat, which is touted on Redfin as “one of Lake Tahoe’s finest lakefront properties and the pinnacle waterfront estate within the gated Glenbrook community.”
The home features a “spectacular lakeside gazebo [that] rests between the park-like grounds and the calming shores of Glenbrook Bay,” the real estate website says.
The president has enjoyed free vacations at the homes of other prominent Democrats, but the White House said that he will pay for the stay at Steyer’s three-acre property.
“The First Family is renting a private home for their stay in Lake Tahoe,” a statement read. “The home belongs to Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor. The First Family is renting the home for fair market value.”
Fair market value? If that was the case, why did he choose the home of a political crony? Fair market value means he could have chosen anyone. The Post points out that there's no way of verifying "fair market value" which could be anything, actually, let alone whether he paid it. He has taken many such vacations at the homes of billionaires before, during his presidency, and reportedly never paid a dime, nor did he claim these to-dos as "gifts" on disclosure forms.
Last August, Biden and his family spent seven days at the nine-bedroom Kiawah Island, SC, mansion of donor Maria Allwin, whose family runs a hedge fund, after asking her to use the home, a source told The Post at the time.
“They’re not paying. They’ve never paid,” the source said.
First lady Jill Biden extended her stay on Kiawah another five days after testing positive for COVID-19.
For Thanksgiving, the extended Biden family stayed for six days at the Nantucket Island compound of billionaire investor David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group.
The White House and a spokesperson for Rubenstein didn’t respond to inquiries about whether the Bidens paid.
In late December and early January, the first couple, their daughter Ashley and grandkids Natalie and Hunter stayed seven days for free as “guests” at the beachfront St. Croix home of businesspeople Bill and Connie Neville.
What's new here is that Biden is taking these luxe vacays during his sitting presidency, not his post-presidency, as presidents such as Obama have done. Of course they have the appearance of bribery. If so, in Obama's case, the reward would have been delayed. In the Bidens' case, the goody was paid upfront to the Big Guy.
Isn't this the same stuff the lefties are yelling about Supreme Court justices taking, calling it a threat to democracy? Somehow when Democrats do it, nobody at ProPublica says a thing.
That Biden is hanging out with Steyer is disturbing, too. There is no information as to whether Steyer is there or not, and maybe that doesn't matter. Just the kibbitzing with Steyer is creepy -- Steyer is a greenie fanatic and Trump impeachment enthusiast who likes to fling around a lot of money on those causes. When we talk about Biden somehow being on the strings of someone, Steyer may be that someone, calling the shots, insisting that Biden be inflexible on his shutdown of American fossil fuel production and shovel the greenie projecgt cash through his so-called Inflation Protection Act which was anything but, as well as dedicate all his presidential time and energy towards the persecution of his rival, President Trump.
Meanwhile, the luxe nature of this thing is pretty disgusting, too. Hasn't he taken enough vacation, having spent between 30% and 40% of his presidency on kicking back and taking it easy? And in the age of Bidenflation, when many Americans can no longer afford to go on vacation at all, the luxury nature of this big family spread in fancy schmancy Lake Tahoe is pretty offensive, too. He likes to throw it in Americans' faces, doesn't he?
Worst of all in this weeklong extravaganza, he's opted to throw a crumb to Maui, whose entire royal city of Lahaina was burned to the ground in a wildfire. He'll take one day out of this priority vacation trip to make a side trip to the island, presumably to act as consoler in chief, and praise all the government bureaucrats at work for it, plus tout his $00 payouts to residents who've lost everything they've owned in the wildfire, but it's unlikely that that's what they were looking for. Twitter, for one, is full of complaints about FEMA applications being rejected by those who have lost everything -- if Biden were serious, he'd deal with that. If he were even more serious, he'd take on the wokester Hawaiian water official who delayed the delivery of water for five hours so he could consult a few taro farmers to see if taking their water to quench the conflagration inferno on the other side of the island was, you know, O.K.
No such luck. He's just deigning to take some of his valuable vacation time to fly over to Hawaii to speak some banalities before the cameras.
No wonder the locals don't want him around. Everyone can see that Biden's Tahoe vacation comes first.
Image: Screen shot from Fox40 video, via YouTube