“No comment” when asked about the recent tragic loss of life on Maui?

On Sunday, a reporter shouted out her question as President Biden was leaving his house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware:

“MR. PRESIDENT, ANY COMMENT ON THE RISING DEATH TOLL IN HAWAII?” Biden looked at her, paused for a moment, mouthed the words “No. No comment,” and then he smiled. HE SMILED! WTF!!

As of half an hour ago, the confirmed death count on Maui stood at 96.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/14/us/maui-wildfires-what-we-know/index.html

That’s a human tragedy of national proportions. So why would the President of the United States say “No comment” when asked about the recent tragic loss of life on Maui? When I first read about Biden’s response, my guess was that, at the time the question was asked, he was urgently headed for a restroom and couldn’t afford to stop. The alternative explanation seemed much worse – that his memory is going and he did not, at that moment, recall there being any problem on Maui.

Then I saw the video. When he was asked the question, he seemed relaxed, at ease. He wasn’t hurrying to the bathroom… So why the “No comment”?

Let’s not forget that Joe Biden has been a professional politician for more than half a century, and he’s known to be a very loquacious politician at that. If he were still “all there,” he could have strung a few sentences together, even if he was headed for the bathroom at the time: “Our thoughts and prayers, blah-blah-blah” or “Our hearts go out, blah-blah-blah….”

My most generous explanation of that moment is that he didn’t hear the question and rather than ask for it to be repeated, he simply gave a typical politician’s all-purpose response, “No comment.” But what if he really did hear and understand the question? How do we explain his response in that case? Maybe he wondered to himself, “Why are people dying on Maui? I don’t remember.” Or even worse, maybe he asked himself, “Where is Maui?”