The season for White House folly
Donald Trump promised he’d bring Christmas back to the White House, since previous administrations spent the season worshipping pagan idols in the Rose Garden.
Seriously, the man does know how to make holiday history. Thanks to him, we now have a model for how to celebrate the Nativity while your former national security adviser pleads guilty to lying to the FBI. Think about it. What would you do for decorations?
Friday’s White House Christmas party, which came just after the news about Mike Flynn broke, was – whoops – for the press.
Trump did show up. Not every president would go to a party right after discovering that one of his campaign’s top foreign policy advisers was co-operating with an investigation into whether Russia had tried to fix the election. So give the man credit.
Considering the drama of the day, attendees described the event as rather ‘‘blah’’. Trump spoke for a couple of minutes about, um, the holidays. He chatted up some Fox personalities and then took a powder.
It was probably not exactly what he’d imagined. On the plus side, Trump did avoid spending hours having his picture taken with every Christmas party guest, one by one. Barack Obama always had to do that.
All in all, it was quite the irony. After all the talk about bringing back Christmas, Trump’s party was way less celebratory than his predecessor’s fetes.
There are two ways of looking at this. One is that you’d be off your game, too, if you discovered, somewhere between the holly and the phony snow, that you were cruising toward an impeachment new year.
The other is that even if Flynn had kept quiet until the feast of the Epiphany, Trump would have found a way to screw up our season, to make things weird at minimum. It’s sort of his genius.
Remember during the campaign, when he managed to ruin the affable, bipartisan Al Smith dinner for Catholic charities by comparing himself to Jesus and suggesting Hillary Clinton hated Catholics? And just this week he wrecked a tribute to Native American war heroes with that Pocahontas joke. You can never relax.
It’s times like this one that we mull how useful it might be to have a royal family. The kind that just devotes itself to producing cute new heirs to the throne and doesn’t even have a national security adviser.
Even before the Flynn crisis exploded, it was becoming clear that Trump couldn’t be trusted to get us through a holiday season unscathed. It’s true that he did pardon those turkeys. But earlier this week, he managed to wreck a normal political sit-down-with-theopposition talk with Democratic leaders about keeping the government open for the rest of the year.
To set his version of the proper mood, Trump tweeted: ‘‘Problem is they want illegal immigrants flooding into our country unchecked, are weak on crime and want to substantially raise taxes. I don’t see a deal.’’
Now people, suppose you were scheduled to attend an annual party in your apartment building. And the tenant committee chairman posted a note by the elevator, saying you were ‘‘weak on cleanups, tasteless on lobby decorations and always leaving the door open for raccoons to get in. I don’t see a good time.’’ Would you still show up with your pathetic little plate of cookies or take the hint and stay home?
Schumer and Pelosi stayed home. Trump demanded they ‘‘put aside their pettiness’’. It was always going to be Christmas in chaos. Flynn is just the special ornament on our national tree of trauma.
Trump’s attempt to yell at British Prime Minister Theresa May wound up mailed to Theresa May Scrivener, a normal British mum who seemed worried that ‘‘the world’s most powerful man managed to press the wrong button’’.
As are we all.
New York Times