Perhaps I shouldn’t expect much in the way of modest rhetoric from a guy who has spent his entire adult life in elective office.
Still, it rubbed me the wrong way to read this tweet in which Biden takes personal credit for the allocation of federal funds to combat COVID:
“…because I’ve made billions available….”
The money didn’t come out of his personal pocket, and it didn’t come from some federal slush fund for the President to allocate however he sees fit.
Congress has passed bipartisan legislation and the President has signed bills to combat COVID. That statement is true of both Trump and Biden. My guess is that anyone of either party who happened to occupy the White House during this pandemic would have proposed “the allocation of federal funds to combat COVID.” Still, I recognize that presidents of both parties tend to speak of federal government actions and accomplishments in the first-person singular – singing their own praises – when discussing actions that have proven popular with the electorate.
Biden’s tweet also makes the somewhat odd claim that “we’re facing the BA.5 variant – it’s the reason I got sick….” No, that’s not actually “the reason” he got sick. If it were, then everyone in the country would be sick today, but most of us aren’t.