Donald Trump’s failed Hurricane Irma photo op

| 6:46 pm EDT September 9, 2017
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There are a number of valuable lessons that Donald Trump could have learned from his tone-deaf and poorly received response to Hurricane Harvey. Don’t use a storm visit to try to sell hats. Don’t brag about crowd size once you get there. Don’t brag about the size of your hands. But it appears Trump has only managed to take one lesson away from it: don’t let Mike Pence steal the photo op. Here’s a lesson Trump clearly has not learned: don’t be on vacation during landfall.

When it was announced that Donald Trump was dragging his entire cabinet up to Camp David this weekend, I wrote what many of you were probably thinking: he wanted to make sure that this time around, he got to have the photo op looking presidential while interacting with officials about the hurricane. During Harvey, Trump wandered off and ended up allowing Pence to have that “presidential” photo op instead. Not this time, however.

In fact today Trump posted not just a photo op, but an entire video, of him holding the Camp David cabinet meeting in question (link). As has become his norm during this disaster season, Trump managed to use bombastic words (his cabinet is going to do “fantastic things”) while simultaneously sounding completely lifeless and uninterested. He even hauled Mike Pence to the meeting, just so everyone could see which one of them was running it. But worse than his performance during his cabinet meeting is the fact that everyone now knows he’s on vacation.

What kind of “President of the United States” can’t be bothered to cancel his weekend getaway so that he can remain at the White House where his leadership is needed? The same kind of “President” who forces his entire cabinet to travel on vacation with him, just so he can get a gratuitous photo op with them during the hurricane. He still hasn’t figured out that the photo op in question is merely serving as a reminder to those in the path of Hurricane Irma that he’s indeed gone on vacation while they’re hunkering down.