They say you can’t go home again, and President Joe Biden is, apparently, no exception to this. Sure, he’s got those fancy digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but that’s for the work week. While the president has been criticized for the amount of time he’s spent on vacation while ostensibly serving as leader of the free world, there’s a new report indicating that the real reason Biden has been spending so much time at his Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, house is that his Wilmington, Delaware, home is being renovated.
Unprompted, Biden approached reporters Sunday in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, after he went to Mass at St. Edmond Roman Catholic Church to say he was not on vacation.
“I have no home to go to,” said Biden, who lives at the White House on weekdays and spends most weekends in Delaware, where he has two homes.
The U.S. Secret Service has been doing work on his longtime primary residence in Wilmington, Delaware, to make it more secure “in a good way,” he said.
There’s no word yet on exactly what “work” the Secret Service might be doing on the Wilmington residence — or why it needed to be made “more secure.”
Here’s a bit of background on the Wilmington compound:
In 1996, Biden purchased four acres of secluded, lakefront land in the upscale suburb of Wilmington, Delaware, and built this 6,850-square-foot home. According to Zillow, the lot was purchased back then for $350,000 and the property is now estimated to be worth more than $1 million, though a real estate expert put that figure closer to $2 million. During his vice presidency, he rented out a cottage on the property to the Secret Service for $2,200 a month. When his son Beau was battling brain cancer, Biden considered selling the house to help pay for treatments but was discouraged from doing so by President Barack Obama, who offered to lend him the money instead.
The revelation certainly raises some questions. Like: Why is the Secret Service doing the work? In an effort to enhance security on the home, will they be creating visitor logs? Will the enhanced security include drug-sniffing canines to reduce the likelihood of Schedule II narcotics finding their way into the home? Will a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) be installed so that when Biden’s tenure as president is over, he has a secure place to review and store classified documents — someplace a bit more secure than in his garage, next to his beloved ’67 Corvette, and one which won’t necessitate an FBI raid to retrieve any documents the National Archives determines it should have returned?
Whatever the scope of the work, it appears to be fairly extensive.
It has been at least a few months since he last spent a night there.
“So I have no place to go when I come to Delaware, except here, right now,” he said, speaking of his other home, in Rehoboth Beach. “I’m only here for one day.”
Biden had originally been scheduled to spend the entire holiday weekend at the beach house, but Hurricane Idalia mucked that up.
While acknowledging that he isn’t truly “homeless,” the president did seem a bit unclear as to how many homes he actually has.
Asked Sunday if he was saying that he’s homeless, Biden said that was not the case.
“No, I’m not homeless,” he said. “I just have one home. I have a beautiful home. I’m down here for the day because I can’t go home home.”
Oddly enough, Biden sounds a bit like he’s channeling Oliver Anthony with that sentiment.
