OPINION:
The minute you take your hand off that Bible at noon on Jan. 20, the weight of the world falls on your shoulders. And it stays there until someone else takes that same 35-word oath four or eight years later — the oath of the presidency.
Here’s something that won’t shock you readers but seems to have the mainstream media befuddled: Presidents are never “off.” They can never call in “sick.” They are president for every minute of every day until they’re not. It really is a 24/7/365 job, unlike any other.
And it’s a game the two sides play: Republicans bashed former President Barack Obama for playing 333 rounds of golf during his presidency and vacationing in Hawaii over Christmas, so now it’s the Democrats’ turn to berate President Trump for playing golf and “vacationing” at one of his many luxury resorts.
So, true to the script, that’s just what the Democrats are doing. And perhaps not surprisingly, the mainstream media is gleefully joining in on the tired old saw.
Newsweek went all in last week with a cover showing Trump splayed out in a recliner, bag of Cheetos in one hand, TV remote control in the other. “LAZY BOY: Donald Trump is bored and tired. Imagine how bad he’d feel if he did any work,” says the cover text. “Trump, America’s Boy King: Golf and Television Won’t Make America Great Again,” reads the story headline.
One paragraph says Trump “sits and stews, like Al Bundy, the shoe-selling protagonist of ’Married With Children’, the sitcom of roiling white discontent that predicted Trump better than any political scientist or pundit. Unsatisfying job, ungrateful children, all around him a nation in decline. Bundy dreams of the days when he was a high school football star; Trump, of his election-night romp through the Upper Midwest.”
“Donald Trump’s overcompensation vacation,” CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote on Monday. And the “journalist” mocked Trump for saying he was hard at work up at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
“Working hard or hardly working, amirite?” he snarked on Twitter. Ha ha, hilarious.
So, the meme is Mr. Trump is lazy. There’s a lot of things people can say about Mr. Trump — some of them quite accurate — but “lazy” just isn’t one of them.
At 70 years old, Mr. Trump is almost indefatigable. He seems hardly to sleep: Tweeting out messages at 1, 2 a.m., then back up and at it again at 6 or 7 a.m. Unlike other presidents — who claimed never to watch TV or follow the polls — Mr. Trump not only does both those things, he revels in them, reacting quickly, firing out posts on Twitter.
On Monday, Mr. Trump sent out 13 tweets, responding to everything from Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s appearance on CNN (he eviscerated the phony valor thief) to the fake news media to the celebration of Purple Heart Day.
His first tweet was at 6:38 a.m. His last tweet from the night before, right after a phone call with the South Korean president, was at 9:22 p.m. So, doing a little math, that’s roughly a 15-hour day. A little dinner, a quick six-hour sleep and he was right back at it.
While some critics demand Mr. Trump stop tweeting, he does so to get past the endless fake news from the pseudo-journalists covering his presidency. With the new meme that Mr. Trump is “lazy,” the president is making sure to detail all of his work, from phone calls to meetings.
“Working in Bedminster, N.J., as long planned construction is being done at the White House. This is not a vacation - meetings and calls!” he wrote on Saturday. “Just completed call with President Moon of South Korea. Very happy and impressed with 15-0 United Nations vote on North Korea sanctions,” he tweeted Sunday. “Working hard from New Jersey while White House goes through long planned renovation. Going to New York next week for more meetings,” he said Monday.
And on Tuesday at 7:11 a.m. — on his so-called golf “vacation,” Trump tweeted: “I will be holding a major briefing on the Opioid crisis, a major problem for our country, today at 3:00 P.M. in Bedminster, N.J.”
By 8 a.m., Trump had already sent out five tweets, on topics ranging from the opioid crisis to North Korea moving anti-ship cruise missiles to the failing Obamacare.
Of course, the MSM knows Mr. Trump isn’t lazy, but they’re running out of weapons to take him down, so they’re giving it a try, anyway.
They’ve tried everything else.
• Joseph Curl has covered politics for 25 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent at The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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