President Donald Trump campaigned circles around Hillary Clinton in 2016, making 46 more stops to key battleground states than his Democratic opponents in the final 100 days of the election. A tally of Trump’s 289 accomplishments during his first 20 months in office compelled the Washington Examiner to praise his “‘relentless’ promise-keeping.’”
And yet, the mainstream press is currently operating on overdrive to slam the president for all of the “executive time” listed on a leaked White House itinerary which Trump reserves for unscheduled activities. To lend credence to the argument that Trump treats his presidency like a luxury vacation, Politico’s Eliana Johnson observed Monday that Trump has “aged very little in the two years he’s held office.”
Elder statesman
Johnson tweeted:
Trump has shaped the office to himself rather than conforming to the office, to an astonishing degree. Executive time is one indication. Another: He’s aged very little in the two years he’s held the office. https://t.co/tsEKFOwaho
— Eliana Johnson (@elianayjohnson) February 3, 2019
Johnson was responding to a report from Axios’s Jonathan Swan which demonstrated how Trump’s daily schedule compared to previous presidents. The article held up President George W. Bush, who was constantly lampooned by the liberal media as an ignoramus-in-chief, as the standard for a consummate disciplinarian.
The hate-Trump media took the White House itinerary leak and ran with it, making wild assumptions about how the president spends his time. One Newsweek article concluded that “Trump spends two-thirds of his time as president doing nothing in particular.”
Another smear campaign
Of course, the facts don’t support this defamatory assessment. As the original report made clear, Trump’s executive time often includes “calls with heads of state, political meetings and meetings with counsel in the residence, which aren’t captured on these schedules.”
That Trump wouldn’t want his leak-prone staff reporting on his daily activities to a hostile media isn’t surprising. It also isn’t much of a bombshell that this same confrontational media would take an intentionally vague schedule and turn it into a manifesto on presidential laziness.
What is astonishing is that Johnson would make subjective judgments about the president’s health and personal appearance to throw gasoline on this Democrat dumpster fire.
Sure, column inches have been devoted towards the aging patterns of past presidents. Publishers like Huffpo have spliced together before-and-after images of former presidents to suggest that the toll of the office prematurely ages the commander-in-chief.
One of these photos portrayed President Barack Obama, who at 47-years-old was just entering his golden years when he took office in 2009, as an elder statesman with a head full of silver hair when he left the White House — as if such a development were completely unnatural for a man in his 50s.
The epitome of good health
Meanwhile, the press dismissed wholesale a December 2015 report allegedly dictated to Trump’s physician which concluded that the president’s “physical strength and stamina are extraordinary.”
Only President Trump, who has been the subject of unparalleled criticism from the liberal-dominated media, could simultaneously be supposedly too unhealthy to hold the office, and yet somehow be in too good physical shape to hold the office.
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