A CNN panel on Tuesday criticized President Donald Trump for playing golf as Hurricane Dorian was bearing down on Florida.
In a tweet on Tuesday, Trump admitted that he played a “very fast round of golf.”
The CNN panel used a few of the president’s own words to remind him that he had a pattern of going after former President Barack Obama and other politicians who play golf.
“Obama ought to get off the golf course and get down there,” Trump said while campaigning in 2016.
“I’m going to be working for you, I’m not going to have time to play golf,” he said at another event.
“I’m not going to be playing much golf, believe me,” Trump remarked at a Feb. 2016 campaign event.
CNN’s John King pointed out that “there’s clearly hypocrisy” from Trump.
“The other question is the empathy factor,” CNN’s John King explained to his panel. “I can’t find the words for it. Has he rewritten all the rules, all the norms?”
“It doesn’t come naturally to him,” the AP’s Julie Pace agreed. “And in some ways he doesn’t really try.”
“It’s just not a good look in a time of crisis,” Vivian Salama of The Wall Street Journal observed, “when Americans are evacuating their homes and things like that. They wanted a little bit more from the president.”
CNN congressional correspondent Phil Mattingly predicted that Trump would get away with playing golf during the hurricane as long as everyone else did their jobs.
“Everybody says, do what you need to do, if that’s on a golf course or anything else,” Mattingly opined. “The concern… is that this seeming lax approach from the president extends down the government, a government where ‘acting’ officials are pervasive and people aren’t sure who is running what.”
“If something goes wrong, this become particularly bad,” he added. “All people need to do is point to the president’s Twitter account or point to the president on the golf course.”
