The RAE says that “pornography” is synonymous with “obscenity.” Well, that is what was seen yesterday afternoon in the Oval Office, in the White House. The president of the United States, Donald Trump, turned a meeting with children to promote sports and healthy living into an incongruous sum of references for adults, from war to transsexuality. The faces of the minors. “You may be too young for this,” the Republican admitted out loud. But it didn’t stop.
What was supposed to be a morning of jumping, running and optimistic advice ended up feeling more like a tense National Security Council briefing or a black comedy monologue. What is clear is that Trump has once again broken all the protocols of presidential etiquette and has forgotten the minimum prudence in front of such a particular audience. Instead of encouraging kids to eat vegetables, she decided to vent about the risk of nuclear conflict and the participation of trans women in sports. Ideal.
The setting was the relaunch of the Presidential Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition, which held speeches and dances on the grounds of the White House. However, it didn’t take the tycoon even five minutes to divert the script. As the children and their parents watched astonished, Trump issued a grim warning: “We are very close to a Third World War.” Without anesthesia.
“You are going to inherit a mess”
Far from offering a message of hope to new generations, Trump opted for the crudest (and misplaced, too) realism. According to media such as Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast, the former president assured the minors that the international panorama is bleak, specifically mentioning the tensions with Iran.
“You are going to inherit a mess, but we are going to solve it before you get there,” said the Republican, in one of the phrases that has resonated the most on social networks due to the inappropriateness of the context. There have been many, all viral. But it didn’t stop there: the president expanded on American military power, too. “We have the most incredible military equipment in the world, but we never want to have to use it,” he said.
The war in Iran was another of his axes, which he started talking about without being relevant. In one of the most surreal moments, a journalist, with a small child standing right next to him, asked the president if he believed that Iranian protesters could overthrow his government if the United States armed them, and the president responded by describing the brutal massacre of protesters. He then began to describe how protesters against the ayatollahs’ regime were shot “between the eyes” by snipers.
“They were shot right between the eyes”
He then began another round of questions with the media, leaving his young guests uncomfortable as he rambled on about irrelevant topics. “They would have had a nuclear weapon,” the president told golfer Gary Player, flanked by several small children for being part of the sports campaign, while others stood on the president’s other side. “And remember, we sent that magnificent B-2 bomber… we destroyed its nuclear potential. It was annihilated,” he boasted.
“If Iran had a nuclear weapon…maybe we wouldn’t all be here right now,” he continued. “I assure you, the Middle East would be gone. Israel would be gone. And they would have set their sights first on Europe, and then on us,” he said. “They don’t have weapons. You can have 200,000 people protesting and five or six armed sick people, and when they start shooting them between the eyes, you see one guy fall, and then another, and they don’t have weapons,” he insisted, in front of silent and sad-faced children. “Last month they killed 42,000 people. 42,000 unarmed protesters,” in case data was missing.
“Men in women’s competitions”
If talking about hypersonic missiles to schoolchildren wasn’t enough, Trump decided that the fitness event was the ideal time to revisit one of his favorite topics in the American culture war: the participation of transgender athletes.
“We don’t want men competing in women’s sports,” he stated, provoking a mix of scattered applause and uncomfortable silences among the audience present. The magnate insisted that this was a matter of “justice”, ignoring that he was at an event to promote basic physical exercise among primary school children.
As if that were not enough, he ended up ridiculing a girl for not being very tall. He directly told him to quit volleyball, because it doesn’t suit him.
“Unhinged”
Analysts and opposition politicians have described the intervention as “unhinged” (unhinged), pointing out that Trump seems unable to adapt his speech to the audience in front of him. “It was an unfiltered diatribe about war and hate at an event that is supposed to be about children’s health,” they point out from the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, Trump’s team defends his “honesty” in talking to young people about the “real problems” facing the country.
The event concluded with the children performing some outdoor physical fitness tests, although the atmosphere was already hopelessly strained by warnings of a global catastrophe. At the end of the day, attendees took away a lesson, although probably not the physical education lesson they expected: in the Trump universe, any microphone is good for announcing the end of the world.
