For the first time since March, President Donald Trump hit the links on Saturday. As CNN reported, the president was spotted playing with three other people at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. And while Secret Service members accompanying him wore masks, the president and his partners did not. Trump rode alone in his golf cart and did not appear to have a caddy with him.
Trump’s outing corresponds with the return-to-normal message he’s proffered these past few weeks—something that, as CNN Correspondent Jeremy Diamond put it, the president continues to “will into existence” even as the nation nears 100,000 deaths from COVID-19. Trump appears to be fully aware that he was caught on camera, even at one point waving to the photojournalist recording the footage. Trump’s outing, as CNN noted, comes in stark contrast to Trump’s condemnations of former president Barack Obama for golfing in 2017 after a second case of Ebola was confirmed in the United States.
At the time, Trump called into Fox and Friends to say that “when you’re president, you sort of say, like, I’m going to sort of give it up for a couple of years and I’m gonna really focus on the job,” adding that “there are times you can play and times you can’t play. It sends the wrong signal.”
Trump noted that Obama also “[teed] it up” following the beheading of Daniel Pearl, something that Trump’s newest press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, also used against the former president—despite the fact that the beheading occurred in 2002, when Obama was a state senator. “You have President Obama, who…spoke to how upset he was about that, then rushed off to a golf game,” McEnany said in 2017. “I think when we’re in a state of war, when we’re in a state of mourning, you should take time off the golf course.”
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