- On Monday before noon, the Biden administration called a "lid" on the day for public-facing events.
- The announcement led to backlash from GOP legislators, pundits, and some reporters.
Around noon on Monday, the Biden administration officially called a "lid" on public-facing appearances for the day, leading some Republican legislators, political talking heads, and reporters to express their outrage.
"You've got to be shitting me?!?" Donald Trump Jr. wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "It's Monday at noon. Our greatest ally in the Middle East is at war, women and children are being slaughtered and raped in the streets, and our imbecile president is checking out before lunch?"
"Alabamians don't work those kind of hours," Sen. Tommy Tuberville joked.
"A lid before noon while the Middle East is on fire," Rep. Ralph Norman added. "This is par for the course with Joe Biden."
But Trump Jr., Tuberville, and Norman's posts misconstrue what a lid from the White House actually means.
As the White House's deputy press secretary Andrew Bates noted online, a "lid" is simply a "courtesy announcement to reporters that they should not expect public events."
It doesn't mean the president stopped working for the day, Bates added.
Hours after the lid was called, the White House — along with leaders from France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom — announced they'd held a call on Monday to discuss the ongoing fighting in Israel and Gaza between Hamas and Israeli forces.
The White House pool report also noted on Monday evening that Biden had been interviewed on Sunday and Monday in special counsel Robert Hur's investigation into classified documents that were discovered at the president's home, another likely reason Biden was unavailable for any public-facing events on Monday.
Hours after the lid was announced, Bates found an opportunity to respond to Tuberville's assertions.
"He was busy delivering this while you sat in your Florida home continuing to endanger the United States military," Bates wrote to Tuberville on X. He also posted to Fox News' John Roberts that the president had been "working to support Israel all day."
The political strategy of going after Biden for calling a lid on the day isn't anything new — it's a recycled trick from Trump's 2020 campaign playbook, where he frequently used Biden's campaign lids as ammunition.
"Did you see he did a 'lid' this morning again?" Trump said at a rally in Florida in 2020. "A lid is when you put out word you're not going to be campaigning today. So, he does a lid all the time."