Donald Trump spent a weekend of national unrest in a very Donald Trump way: hiding (in a bunker at one point) and sending angry tweets. Despite his stint hiding in a bunker, Trump was very much the Twitter tough guy, blustering about having “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons” at his disposal.
The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker summed it up in devastating fashion, writing “Trump and some of his advisers calculated that he should not speak to the nation because he had nothing new to say and had no tangible policy or action to announce yet, according to a senior administration official. Evidently not feeling an urgent motivation Sunday to try to bring people together, he stayed silent.” Except for the tweets.
Even some Republicans saw Trump’s absolute failure of leadership. “Obviously the unrest and the anger is well justified,” Al Cardenas, a former chairman of the American Conservative Union, told Rucker. “Hardly goes a week by when some white person, whether it’s a white supremacist or a racist law enforcement officer, does not kill a black person needlessly. … What the country needs and wants from the president, they’re not going to get. This president, I don’t believe, relates to the racism, relates to the pain. At least I haven’t seen it.”
Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, told Fox News, “Those are not constructive tweets, without any question.”
Monday, Trump let us in on his morning activities by repeatedly tweeting about Fox & Friends.
In a different category of leadership altogether, former Vice President Joe Biden took his second trip out of coronavirus isolation recently to visit and talk with protesters. Similarly, George Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd, described a phone call with Biden as a “great conversation” and a call with Trump as “very brief.”
