The Wrong Signal?
Donald Trump seems to be happy to represent himself as a wartime president, despite somehow thinking that a good thing for the president to do during this “war” is play golf.
Even if you ignore the “war” rhetoric, when Barack Obama was president Trump attacked him (more than once) for playing golf during the Ebola epidemic (at the time, there were two cases of Ebola in the US). Trump said:
When you’re president, you sorta say, ‘I’m gonna give [golf] up for a couple of years and really focus on the job,’. It sends the wrong signal.
And when running for president, Trump promised:
I’m going to be working for you. I’m not going to have time to go play golf.
But I can see calling the fight against COVID-19 a “war”, because today we will pass over 100,000 Americans dead. That’s way more deaths than the Vietnam War (58.220 dead), and it only took us a couple of months to do that. It is ironic that this is happening on Memorial Day.
But if this is war, then Trump has a strange way of prosecuting it, as he seems more concerned about his re-election than winning the war. For example, he refuses to wear a mask or practice social distancing, despite the fact that the coronavirus has been found in people close to him. And he continually downplays the severity of the situation, ignoring his own doctors and scientists and encouraging people to attend church in person, even thought hat will surely result in more deaths.
