To be clear, Mr Biden and his team aren’t without room for valid criticism here. The Maui wildfires began a week ago, days before he would leave for vacation. By Friday, when the president was departing Washington, Hawaiian officials were already beginning to announce investigations into their own handling of the situation as the death toll climbed.

Was there anything the president should have been doing in Washington instead of going to Delaware this weekend? Probably not; beyond holding meetings with relevant officials (which can be done remotely) and approving disaster declarations (ditto), there isn’t a long list of actions for the president to take, especially as officials in Maui urge well-wishers and would-be helpers to stay off the island.

But image is everything. Appearance is everything. There’s already an existing and growing stigma around commanders-in-chief who take frequent weekend vacations to their personal properties. And a president needs to appear informed of the situation and present at the helm in times of emergency. Sometimes that means staying home. Other times, it might just mean having a canned statement ready to go for the reporters lined up on the boardwalk.

[The “no comment” likely resulted from a lack of comprehension of the question — but that’s also a problem for Biden. He made it worse with his half-assed aid package to the survivors of the destruction in Lahaina, a whopping $700 per person to tide them over after losing everything they owned. This is not so much a 3 AM phone call moment than it is Biden’s Hurricane Katrina, as Ed Driscoll wrote … if the press covered such things fairly. — Ed]