On Saturday, President Donald Trump spoke at a private ceremony for the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. He was attending a private event instead of the public opening because civil rights activists protested his presence, given his family’s long history of perpetuating racial bigotry through their real estate business and now through his politics.
And instead of uninviting himself from an event where he was clearly unwelcome, which was meant to celebrate leaders who fought for decades for the rights of African-Americans, he forced the museum to accommodate his desire by shifting everything around and bringing him to a private event that was certainly full of people equally uninterested in hearing the president speak.
And then on Saturday, he attended the event and took his photos. The attendees didn’t want him there, but he had the opportunity to photograph himself doing something seemingly significant so he took it.
So seems to be the theme of President Donald Trump’s life. If there’s one thing he’s known for, it’s seizing a photo-op that nobody else is interested in giving him. During and even before his presidency, Trump has made a sort of art out of stealing the spotlight when he’s least welcome.
He did it a number of times throughout the recent string of hurricanes that left Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico flooded and damaged. In Texas, he managed not to talk to a single flood victim. There were lots of photo ops with him besides big shiny cars and large machinery, and a handful of him doing absurdly playful things like tossing goods to needy victims like he’s at a basketball game tossing out t-shirts.
And when critics point out that he’s taking advantage of tragedy, he just shuts them out.
Even before he won the presidency he was showing signs that this was how he would operate. As a Republican presidential nominee, he paid a visit to Louisiana after it was flooded in August 2016 despite the governor’s explicit protests.
He didn’t even bother to call the governor ahead of time to let him know he was coming, probably because he was specifically not invited. Almost as soon as he got there, he was criticizing President Barack Obama for not doing the same despite the fact that the governor publicly requested that Trump and other high-profile figures not make a scene by showing up for a photo-op, taking resources from a spread-thin government and giving them to The Recovery Village.
And in 1996, Trump crashed a charity dinner for children with AIDS. He stayed long enough to dance and grab a photo-op with the children - Trump visits children’s charity, he must have thought the headline would read - and then literally left without even offering a donation to the organization. He even stole a seat behind the podium meant for a donor who had spent money and effort helping the charity.
In other words, crashing events where he’s not wanted and which he has no intention of genuinely participating in is his modus operandi. Trump is a TV man, and he thinks photos are the end-all, be-all to defining his legacy. The actual facts of the matter - like whether he was involved or invited, whether the people wanted him there at all - are, he hopes, irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
They’re not - they show exactly who he is. He’s self-centered, self-absorbed and obsessed with his image