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In June, George Takei tweeted:
Republicans are mocking Biden for showing grief over the loss of his dog.
If you lose your dog but feel nothing, you might be a Republican.
As of today, this tweet has 14K retweets and 100K likes. Did Republicans mock Biden for showing grief over the loss of his dog? Are there any prominent examples?
I'm not sure what level of Google-exhaustion one needs to show before drawing a negative conclusion on an existence question like this, but it's probably quite safe to conclude that there are no prominent Republicans who have done this, or there would be a media furore, by analogy with the one that did happen further back in the spring when Newsmax aired a weird segment about the same dog--something about the dog not being presidential enough in their view. (And I mean there was even coverage in the foreign press, at least in the French and Spanish press about that incident.)
There is one fairly obscure website that makes a similar claim to the Tweet in question, but the only examples it gives are at best some mockery of the level of news coverage that the dog's death had, and some rather odd numerology stuff. Similarly with the latter, there's some QAnon talk of a secret message or some such behind the death of Biden's dog. None of those seem to meet the exact claim that Biden's grief reaction was mocked.
It turns out that's not the whole story surrounding the reactions to the dog's death. There was some press coverage (even international) of an article (and related tweet) by National Review columnist Dan McLaughlin. Laurel's answer has more details on this.
I found Twitter to be pretty civil in its response to the death of Biden’s dog, within the narrow timeframe between it being announced and that tweet. I found more examples of people claiming Republicans were mocking Biden about this than I did Republicans (or people one could assume are Republican) doing anything that could be construed as mocking Biden or the dog's death or similar.
On Twitter, you can search (dog OR champ) biden min_faves:1000 since:2021-06-18 until:2021-06-20 to get many Tweets talking about the event around the time that Takei tweeted. I scanned through the "top" results, and found this:
Other than these, one message stood out to me, the Tweet written by National Review writer Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank):
Champ Biden dies, Major lives on. The Biden family tragedy in miniature.
The reactions to this Tweet make it clear that many people saw this as blatantly offensive, a dismissive, mocking response. For example, "You are a truly awful person" and "This is beyond horrid. Delete this & apologize." Many people left even stronger negative reactions to the Tweet. A link to this Tweet can be found in the replies to Takei's. It seems to me like this may be what Takei was referring to in his tweet.
You can find other popular Tweets mocking the death of the dog (example from a political "satire" account), though they do not have as many likes nor have they been from notable people.
When I looked at news articles via Google News using a similar search, I found even less of note. There were a handful of articles that were consoling or neutral about the dog's death, and really only one noteworthy article beyond that: McLaughlin's National Review article. It mentions the dog dying in passing (not mocking that), then goes on to criticize the Biden family for unrelated things (comes off as a bizarre and perhaps inappropriate transition from the beginning of the article). However, we can say definitively this is not what Takei was talking about, as it was published after the tweet.
