Trump Spent Less Than Thirty Minutes At Election Security Meeting, Then Ran Off To Play Golf

At this point, every country in the world could be planning to hack the next US election and Donald Trump would neither know about it or care even a tiny bit.

At least, that’s the generous interpretation of his attitude toward election security going into this year’s midterm election. The only other possibility is that he knows a particular country is planning on disrupting democracy once again — as Russia did to great success in the 2016 presidential election — and he actually wants to do nothing about it.

How else could he possibly explain the woefully short and obviously meaningless “Election Security” meeting he had planned for Friday afternoon with his national security advisers?

Republicans refuse to let voters forget how important the upcoming election is, with their constant efforts to undermine the Mueller investigation and their relentless pursuit of ever more federal judge appointments. Some races have already been made aware of planned threats against them, like Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, who found out on Thursday that her vulnerable seat was one such target.

Trump, however, clearly had other things on his mind.

One reporter on hand today at the White House was taking note of Trump’s time management. CNN’s Jeff Zeleny noted that the meeting was scheduled to begin at 3 PM Eastern — but that Trump was seen leaving the meeting after less than half an hour:

Cabinet officials and others invited to today’s NSC meeting on election security are leaving White House now. The meeting was set to start at 3 pm. If it started as scheduled, the president’s meeting on election security was less than 30 minutes.

— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) July 27, 2018

Then the press pool was informed of what Trump was up to afterward, and it all made sense — Trump was on his way to his favorite place, the golf course:

President Trump is leaving for a weekend at his golf retreat in New Jersey. He did not take questions from reporters on the south lawn of the White House as he boarded Marine One.

— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) July 27, 2018