Over Memorial Day weekend, President Trump hit the links for a round of golf, an outing that took place while the total official count for COVID-19-related deaths in the U.S. neared 100,000. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden promptly “pounced,” posting a campaign ad portraying Trump as callously indulging in the leisurely sport while Americans die because of his supposed mismanagement of the crisis. Trump has since responded by highlighting a few facts Biden’s ad left out.
“Nearly 100,000 lives have been lost, and tens of millions are out of work. Meanwhile, the president spent his day golfing,” Biden tweeted Saturday along with a 30-second ad featuring Trump golfing at his private club in Virginia juxtaposed with eerie pandemic footage amid dramatic music.
Biden followed up that post with another golf-themed tweet on Sunday.
“The presidency is about a lot more than tweeting from your golf cart,” wrote Biden. “It requires taking on the ultimate responsibility for the biggest decisions in the world. Donald Trump simply wasn’t prepared for that. I promise you I will be.”
The golf tweets followed another Memorial Weekend post by Biden accusing Trump of fatally mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The hard truth is Donald Trump ignored the warnings of health experts and intelligence agencies, downplayed the threat COVID-19 posed, and failed to take the action needed to combat the outbreak,” Biden tweeted Saturday. “It’s one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in our history.
President Trump responded to the digs in a pair of posts on Sunday in which he noted some key context left out of the Biden ad, including an infamous Obama moment.
“Sleepy Joe’s representatives have just put out an ad saying that I went to play golf (exercise) today. They think I should stay in the White House at all times,” wrote Trump, making sure to highlight that doctors overwhelmingly encourage Americans even in the most severely “locked down” areas to get outside to exercise.
“What they didn’t say is that it’s the first time I’ve played golf in almost 3 months, that Biden was constantly vacationing, relaxing & making shady deals with other countries,” Trump added.
Also left out of the video, said Trump, was “that Barack [Obama] was always playing golf, doing much of his traveling in a fume spewing 747 to play golf in Hawaii – Once even teeing off immediately after announcing the gruesome death of a great young man by ISIS!”
Trump’s ISIS comment was a reference to an infamous game of golf in 2014 by then-President Obama after he had just gotten off the phone with the parents of James Foley, who was murdered by ISIS terrorists. In a “conservatives pounce” piece titled “A Terrorist Horror, Then Golf: Incongruity Fuels Obama Critics,” the left-leaning New York Times framed the incident thusly:
He had just hung up the telephone with the devastated parents before heading in front of the cameras. Unusually emotional, President Obama declared himself “heartbroken” by the brutal murder of an American journalist, James Foley, and vowed to “be relentless” against Islamic radicals threatening to kill another American.
But as soon as the cameras went off, Mr. Obama headed to his favorite golf course on Martha’s Vineyard, where he is on vacation, seemingly able to put the savagery out of his mind. He spent the rest of the afternoon on the links even as a firestorm of criticism erupted over what many saw as a callous indifference to the slaughter he had just condemned.
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