Scrooge McTrump Fucks Up Easter
The incompetence knows no bounds
For almost 100 days now, I haven’t been ready to fully commit to the idea that Donald Trump is the worst president in U.S. history.
Franklin Pierce rode into office thanks Nathaniel Hawthorne’s best-selling biography. At the end of his term, the stage was set for the Civil War. Warren Harding plundered the treasury and oversaw a litany of scandals. William Henry Harrison caught pneumonia and died in 30 days.
With historical remove, it’s easy to call Harrison, Harding and Pierce shitty presidents. But Trump hasn’t even been in office 100 days yet. I’m not saying he’s good and I’m not giving him a chance to do anything other than fuck up.
He’s terrible, for sure, but is he Warren Harding terrible? Is he James Buchanan terrible? I wasn’t ready to say.
Then he fucked up the annual White House Easter party. I’m ready to call it now. Trump will down in history as the worst president the republic has ever seen.
By now you’ve probably seen the horrible footage of the event. Trump kicked off his besmirching of a grand tradition by bragging about his young presidency to a crowd of children. Hopefully, Trump will remind them of every cautionary tale about bullies and liars they’ve ever read about in their children’s books
“We will be stronger, bigger and better as a nation than ever before,” the president told the crowd. “We’re right on track, you see what’s happening. We’re right on track.”
Then, during the national anthem, First Lady Melania Trump had to remind Trump to cover his heart with his hand. Worse, he signed Make America Great Again hats for children then hurled them into the crowd with a shrug.
These moments are the awful actions of a crass man who belongs on the golf course, not the Oval Office. But they’re par for the course and not the reason I think Trump will be so poorly remembered. It’s everything that led to those moments, every bungled opportunity and petty embarrassment.
This is a tradition stretching back over 100 years and because of Trump’s incompetence, it almost didn’t happen at all.
As ridiculous as this sounds, the annual White House Easter Egg Roll is a massive undertaking involving hundreds of employees, thousands of guests and uncounted moving parts. It’s the single biggest public event at the White House every year and requires special security and special consideration.
In the months leading up to this year’s event, most of the relevant parties had no idea if it would even happen. Congressmen, performers and past guests all wondered had no idea what would happen on April 17, 2017. Those in a position to ask, did so and got no response. Others took to social media to reach Trump.
The eggs children roll across the White House lawn aren’t your typical hard-boiled, hand-painted variety. They’re artisanal wooden eggs lathed and painted by Wells Wood Turning in Maine. As the manufacturing deadline loomed at the end of February 2017, the egg company had not yet heard from the White House.
The company was so desperate for communication that it turned to Twitter.
Wells Wood’s Twitter followers followed up over the next month, constantly asking if the White House had requested eggs. It finally did, at the very last minute, and the company announced it would handle manufacturing the eggs on March 26, 2017, less than a month before the event.
The problem was so bad that Wells Wood had the time to process a special order for White House Easter Egg Roll superfan Natalie Rebetsky.
Rebetsky has two dozen of the commemorative Easter eggs on display in her Maryland home. She has, for years, woken her kids at the crack of dawn on Easter and driven them to White House to get a place in line and attend with thousands of other families.
Rebetsky was so worried she wouldn’t get commemorative wooden eggs this year that she contacted Wells Wood and commissioned a set of her own. She funded the project through a Go Fund Me page and donated the proceeds to PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The White house dragged its feet so long that Wells Wood finished Rebetsky’s eggs before finally getting to the official order.
And that order was small compared to previous years. The egg-makers just didn’t have time to churn out the tens of thousands of wooden eggs it normally makes for the White House every year. In 2016, it made 85,000 eggs. This year it made 40,000.
Why? Because the White House couldn’t get its shit together. In the words of Lara Kline — one of the White House’s marketing gurus — they ordered so few eggs because of “the limited manufacturing window for this year’s Easter Egg Roll.”
Attendance — as well as eggs — also plummeted from 35,000 to 21,000. Again, the White House’s poor management is to blame. As of April 11, 2017, various groups that typically got invites had yet to hear from the White House.
D.C. area public schools typically got a block of 4,000 tickets. Just a week away from the event, the schools hadn’t heard a thing. The same went for area military families who usually got 3,000 or so tickets for the kids of vets. Nada.
PBS got the call at the end of March and rushed to get Elmo and other Sesame Street characters on the scene. They only sent one. In past years, Grover and Elmo and Big Bird cavorted among the crowd, but in the Trump year only Elmo showed.
“We just got word about this year’s Egg Roll and are working on planning,” Jennifer Rankin Byrne, PBS’s senior director of media relations, told The New York Times on March 20, 2017.
The shade continued with Sesame Street executive Elizabeth Weinreb Fishman.
“PBS asked us to participate with them, and we agreed to provide a ‘Sesame Street’ character,” she told The New York Times. Elmo appeared and did his duty while Trump’s Sword of Damocles dangled over his head. This is the president who has repeatedly called to cut funding to the broadcaster.
The entire affair had the same feel as every other Trump endeavor — from his maligned Trump University to his awful stint as president — staff threw it together at the last minute and rolled it out with all the enthusiasm of a circus managed by hungover carnies.
Attendance was down by a third. Members of Congress didn’t get the memo about the event until the last minute. Trump couldn’t be bothered to treat the kids with even a modicum of respect. Through it all, Melania grinned and sighed and looked as if she wanted to be anywhere else.
We all do, Melania. We all do. Now, to be clear, the White House Egg Roll is small fucking potatoes when compared to all the geopolitical and domestic events a president deals with. But as above, so below. The management of the small things tends to reflect the management of the bigger problems … and Trump’s first Easter in the White House was a shitshow.
Stay defiant.
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