WASHINGTON — President Biden said Wednesday while discussing wildfire devastation in Maui that his Delaware house “almost collapsed” from a small kitchen fire nearly two decades ago — after telling survivors last week that firefighters “ran into flames” to rescue first lady Jill Biden.
The 80-year-old president invoked the tiny 2004 blaze at his Wilmington abode while saying residents of the Hawaiian island won’t be allowed in the damage zone until potentially toxic debris is removed.
“If anybody in Maui is listening, you lost everything … and we’re doing everything we can to move heaven and earth to help you … We’ve already dedicated $24 million to the removal of hazardous material left behind in the fire’s wake … you got to take out the polluted, dangerous stuff,” Biden said in the White House Roosevelt Room.
“It’s going to be frustrating as the devil for people, they’re going say, ‘Why cant I go back? The storm is over, why can’t I go back to see if I can find that wedding ring, or find that album?’” Biden went on, appearing to conflate the Aug. 8 wildfire with Hurricane Idalia.
“It’s really, really tough,” Biden added. “I haven’t done anything like that, but I — lightning struck my house, we had to be out of that house for about seven months while it was repaired because so much damage was done to the house and half of the house almost collapsed.”
Biden referenced the Delaware fire Aug. 21 when speaking in Lahaina to residents whose homes had burned to the ground — claiming that firefighters “ran into flames to save my wife and save my family. Not a joke.”
“I don’t want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense — Jill and I — what it’s like to lose a home,” the president went on.
“Years ago now — 15 years ago — I was in Washington doing ‘Meet the Press.’ It was a sunny Sunday and lightning struck at home on a little lake that is outside of our home — not on a lake, a big pond. And it hit a wire and came up underneath our home into the heating ducts, air conditioning ducts. And to make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette and my cat.”
At the time, however, local fire chief George Lamborn told the Associated Press, “Luckily, we got it pretty early. The fire was under control in 20 minutes.”
The AP reported that the conflagration was a “small fire that was contained to the kitchen” and that now-first lady Jill Biden reported it to emergency services. The wire service did not report that she was trapped inside the home and no injuries were reported.
The president had told several versions of the story over time.
At a fire prevention summit in October, he claimed “we almost lost a couple firefighters” during the blaze.
At an infrastructure-focused event in 2021, he said he “had a house burn down with my wife in it.”
In a delicately worded statement last year, Delaware’s Cranston Heights Fire Company said: “For the fire service, this could be considered an insignificant fire as it did not lead to multiple alarms and did not need a widespread incident response throughout the county. However, in the case for any homeowner, it was obviously significant at the time and was quickly responded to by the local firefighters.”
Biden has a habit of telling factually questionable stories when attempting to relate to his audiences.
He said in Puerto Rico last year that “I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically,” even though only 2,000 Puerto Ricans lived in Delaware when he was launching his career in the early 1970s and his books contain no information about interacting with the small community.
Biden also told students last year at historically black colleges in Atlanta that he was arrested multiple times while protesting in favor of civil rights — another claim for which there is no evidence.
In 2021, the president told Jewish leaders that he remembered “spending time at” and “going to” Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 after 11 people were murdered in the worst anti-Semitic attack in US history. The synagogue said he never visited and the White House later said he was thinking about a 2019 phone call to the synagogue’s rabbi.
Later that month, Biden told an Idaho audience that his “first job offer” came from local lumber and wood products business Boise Cascade, a claim the company said was news to them.
Biden said at the Naval Academy’s graduation ceremony last May — and again at the Air Force Academy this June — that he was appointed to the prestigious Annapolis military college by the late Sen. J. Caleb Boggs (R-Del.). A search of Boggs’ archives failed to turn up evidence of the appointment.
Public perception of Biden’s mental fitness for office is a liability for the Democrat going into next year’s election.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll released in June found that just 32% of voters believe Biden has the mental sharpness needed to be president — while 54% said the same of Donald Trump, 77, the former president and frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
Biden also has a career-long propensity for embellishing personal details. His first presidential campaign ended infamously due to a scandal involving plagiarism of speeches and a law school paper.
The then-senator from Delaware infamously borrowed British politician Neil Kinnock’s family history — with Biden changing geographic details to claim in speeches that “my ancestors … worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours.”
Unlike Kinnock, Biden’s ancestors did not mine coal.
Biden also falsely claimed during that campaign that he “graduated with three degrees from college,” was named “the outstanding student in the political science department,” “went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship” and ”ended up in the top half” of his class.
None of those claims were true.
