Saturday, November 10, 2018

It Always Comes Down To The Hair - Updated

PARIS -- President Trump flew 3,800 miles to this French capital city for ceremonies to honor the military sacrifice in World War I, hoping to take part in the kind of powerful ode to the bravery of the armed forces that he was unable to hold in Washington. 

 But on his first full day here, it rained on his substitute parade weekend. 

 Early Saturday, the White House announced Trump and the first lady had scuttled plans, due to bad weather, for their first stop in the weekend's remembrance activities -- a visit to the solemn Aisne Marne American Cemetery, marking the ferocious Battle of Belleau Wood. (From the Washington Post, read the article here.)

My guess? He couldn't risk a hairdo malfunction. It did not go over well:




Note: Nicholas Soames is Winston Churchill's grandson. 









Monday morning update: I'm still trying to suss out the real reason Donald didn't go to the cemetery on Saturday in France. I admit I had fun, as always, snarking about the hair, but I can also admit that it probably wasn't that simple. My thoughts:

Marine One: The presidential helicopter is operated by the Marines, obviously, and the military, in consultation with the Secret Service, would make the go/no go decision about it. If the Marines say it's not safe to fly, it's not safe to fly. I'll take that one at face value.

Dunford and Kelly: When I saw that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dunford and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly were able to get to the cemetery, I did wonder: if they can get there how come Donald can't? As Josh Barro points out above, their motorcade/security footprints are much smaller than Donald's, making their travel much less disruptive. I'll grant that point as well.

The Other Leaders: What about Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron? They got to the cemetery. Apparently it was a different cemetery than the one Donald was scheduled to visit. The weather there was better? The route to get there was shorter? Their hairdos are more impervious to wind and rain? Whatever. Apples and oranges.

Plan B: This is where I get stuck. As James Fallows (above) and others have pointed out, when the president travels there's always, always, always a back-up plan, not just for weather but for anything unforeseen that might interfere with the president's schedule. Is Donald's White House staff so inept that they failed to anticipate rain in France in November? It's not out of the question. We'll probably never know the exact sequence of decision points that resulted in this PR disaster, or at least not until the memoirs appear in a few years.

For me it comes down to this: Donald didn't want to go, or at the very least, he was happy to have an excuse not to go. If, after being told the helicopter flight was cancelled, he had said to his staff, "This is important to me, I must be there, make it happen," it would have happened. He didn't and there's got to be a reason. We just don't know what it is.

Update #2. Donald did go to a cemetery ceremony on Sunday and yes, he looks wretched:

photo credit Marlene Awaad/Bloomberg News

No wonder he decided today, back in Washington on the actual federal holiday commemorating veterans, to stay warm, dry and perfectly coiffed at the White House. Note that it's not just that he's not visiting Arlington National Cemetery. He's not doing anything. The White House called a news "lid" at 10.00 a.m. and the president has nothing scheduled at all. Nothing.

Update #3 on Tuesday morning. Donald tries a little damage control:
Note: About 20 minutes after I cut-and-pasted this tweet into the blog, Donald deleted it. (That's why it no longer looks like a tweet.) Why did he delete it? I didn't catch it initially, but there's a typo in the second-to-last sentence, in the word ''Cemetary." Donald doesn't always fix his typos but this time he did:

Also note that Donald has plenty of time for typo-fixing because he has nothing on his official schedule today.

And, as Talking Points Memo points out, with this tweet Donald contradicted what his own staff said:

The White House initially said that poor weather had precluded flying a helicopter to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial on Saturday. The President could have taken his motorcade 2.5 hours each way to visit the cemetery, but, according to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Sunday, the trip by car "would have required closures to substantial portions of the Paris roadways for the President's motorcade, on short notice."

 "President Trump did not want to cause this kind of unexpected disruption to the city and its people," Sanders said. 

 On Tuesday, Trump contradicted that, instead saying the Secret Service rejected his idea of driving. (Read the entire post here.)

And one more thing. James Fallows, writing at The Atlantic, tries to figure out what really happened in Paris Saturday. He starts with this:

Why, exactly, did Donald Trump not join Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and Justin Trudeau at Saturday's commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the original Armistice Day? I don't know, and I don't think anyone outside the White House does at this point. 

What I do know is that one hypothesis that has shown up in many stories about his no-show--that Marine One, the presidential helicopter, "can't fly" in the rain--doesn't make sense.

...continues with this:

(What follows is based on my having held an instrument rating as an airplane pilot for the past 20 years, and having worked in the Carter-era White House and occasionally having been aboard the Marine One of that era.) 

...and finishes with this: 

The pilots and maintenance practices of Marine One are presumably the best that can be found, but the play-it-safe factor when carrying a president has to be larger than for other missions. So who knows whether some aviation official really said: Sorry, this is no-go.

But precisely because of those cautions and complexities, any known-universe past presidential travel plan would have a bad-weather option, or several of those, already lined up. This is the way it has worked in any White House I've been aware of.

Why didn't an American president go to a once-in-a-lifetime ceremony? Might it have been a still-undisclosed security threat? Something else that Donald Trump had to do? 

I don't know. I do know that whatever the obstacle was, it wasn't that "helicopters can't fly in the clouds and rain." 

In between all that he does a deep dive into the complexities of flying helicopters and the details of Saturday's weather in Paris. Read it here. 
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