President Biden departs the Pacific Northwest after concluding multi-day fundraising trip

Joe Biden’s sec­ond trip to Wash­ing­ton State as Pres­i­dent has come to an end.

Short­ly after mid­day, with tem­per­a­tures sur­pass­ing eighty degrees Fahren­heit in the Seat­tle metro area, the Com­man­der-in-Chief’s motor­cade zoomed down Inter­state 405 from Med­i­na and brought the pres­i­den­tial entourage back to Seat­tle-Taco­ma Inter­na­tion­al Air­port for the out­bound transcon­ti­nen­tal flight to Delaware, Biden’s home state.

A pool reporter trav­el­ing with Biden — Matt Vis­er of The Wash­ing­ton Post — described the jour­ney as “unevent­ful” and wrote: “He got out of the Beast at 1:45 PM and took a pho­to with law enforce­ment offi­cers. As he walked toward the plane, he either ignored or didn’t hear shouts to come elab­o­rate on his fundrais­er remarks on Israel.”

By “fundrais­er remarks on Israel,” Vis­er was refer­ring to com­ments Biden had made less than an hour before in Med­i­na at a cam­paign recep­tion, in which Biden said: “You know, there would be a cease­fire tomor­row if… Hamas would release the hostages: the women and the elder­ly and the wound­ed. Israel said it’s up to Hamas; if they want­ed to do it, we could end it tomor­row. And the cease­fire would begin tomor­row. It all has to do — you know, we’ve not — any­way, I don’t want to — I guess I shouldn’t get into all this about Israel. But, you know — well, I don’t want to get going, I guess.”

Luck­i­ly for Vis­er and the White House press corps, there will plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ties to fol­low up in the days ahead. Biden will be back at the White House on Mon­day and Press Sec­re­tary Karine Jean-Pierre will host an after­noon brief­ing with Q&A. But first comes Moth­er’s Day — and Biden will spend it in Rehoboth Beach. 

The afore­men­tioned pho­to with law enforce­ment includ­ed State Patrol troop­ers as well as local police. From our van­tage point on the press ris­er, we watched them hus­tle to get into place so they’d be ready for the Pres­i­dent. Biden then hopped out of one of the Cadil­lac lim­ou­sines cus­tom built for the Secret Ser­vice and walked across the apron to join them. (“Apron” is the term for the areas where air­craft park. Aprons and taxi­ways are often incor­rect­ly referred to in the mass media as “the tarmac.”)

After the pho­tos were tak­en, Biden walked back to where he’d just been. He paused after climb­ing the Boe­ing VC-25’s airstairs and waved good­bye to the press assem­bled to wit­ness his depar­ture. He then dis­ap­peared into the cabin. 

Less than twen­ty min­utes lat­er, Air Force One was under­way and taxi­ing for takeoff.

We may not see Pres­i­dent Biden in Wash­ing­ton State again before the elec­tion. But Amer­i­cans liv­ing in bat­tle­ground states will be see­ing a lot of him as he hits the cam­paign trail in his rematch with wannabe auto­crat Don­ald Trump.