To say that yesterday was the strangest, saddest, most pathetic Christmas any US President ever had, even this late in 2018, has to be a contender for the understatement of the year. The presidential “address” he gave from the White House, where he was admittedly sitting there alone until his wife took an emergency flight back from Florida to come and comfort him, was so unbelievably bad that we only feel comfortable showing you the Daily Beast‘s brief recap of it, which is still so sad that it turned out to be the hardest 15 seconds of video I watched yesterday:
WATCH: Trump’s very joyous, totally merry, no-I’m-not-lonely-and-sad Christmas message https://t.co/tpF8kESlpy pic.twitter.com/2VMLSEbPcX
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 25, 2018
We get it, we really do — Trump is backed into a corner, his allies are gone, he’s isolated and quite literally alone, even fighting with the few family members he has in his administration. His pride forced him to make the worst decision at Christmas that any President has ever made in shutting down the government just before a holiday recess. He’s quite literally probably about to go to prison.
Our question is, why not try to turn things around at this point? Why not at least try to do what little good you can in the time you have left? That’s probably not even a full term, honestly, and Trump could almost save his own soul if he would just admit he was wrong and apologize.
Instead, we learned from, of all people, the former president’s official photographer Pete Souza (it was probably in the news, but I didn’t hear about it until I saw this tweet) that Trump is the first President in 16 years not to visit the troops at Christmas:
What’s it like to be first potus not to visit our troops at Christmas since 2002; to have a child die at the border today because of you; to have govt workers wonder how they will pay mortgage; and to personally be responsible for everyone’s 401k crashing? Just wondering. https://t.co/Yqlk0RGvzm
— Pete Souza (@PeteSouza) December 25, 2018
We don’t mean he didn’t go to Afghanistan or anything like that. We mean, he didn’t go to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, he didn’t go to Quantico, didn’t go to Andrews AFB — he couldn’t even be bothered to go to Fort McNair, which is in Washington, D.C. right down by the waterfront. More than a hundred million Americans traveled 50 miles or more from their homes to be with those important to them this Christmas, and Trump couldn’t go half that distance — or even a few blocks — to remind our troops that their Commander in Chief still remembers they exist.
We get that he’s too terrified to go to a combat zone or anything like that. But even if you’re having history’s most pathetic White House Christmas since the building was erected, you could still have shaped things up a tiny bit with a visit to some local troops at least… Or a hospital, or an orphanage, or literally anywhere that might make people think you have even one soul in your heart or your head other than your own.
Next year cannot come soon enough.
Featured image via screen capture
