Trump Forces Obama Back to Work

President Obama finally caved and agreed to cut short his family vacation by visiting flood-stricken Louisiana after Donald Trump embarrassingly showed him up in a “presidential” visit of his own.

After Trump’s widely hailed tour of disaster-stricken Louisiana went so remarkably well, Obama relented to mounting criticism and announced Friday that he would abbreviate his vacation golfing in Martha’s Vineyard to personally visit Baton Rouge next week. Obama’s initial reluctance, which had been compared to former President George W. Bush’s infamous response in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans in 2005, was met with widespread scorn and frustration.

“Today, Donald Trump acted more presidential than the president himself, by immediately going to Louisiana while President Obama chose to continue playing golf and Hillary Clinton phoned in her views.”

“Today, Donald Trump acted more presidential than the president himself, by immediately going to Louisiana while President Obama chose to continue playing golf and Hillary Clinton phoned in her views,” former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in a statement on Friday.

Giuliani also went after Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards after he criticized Trump for arriving in the flood-ravaged state for a “photo-op.”

“The Democrat governor’s criticism of Mr. Trump’s visit to Louisiana is an outrage, and completely inconsistent with their criticism of President Bush’s decision to not go to New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina,” Giuliani said. “It is the defining principle of leadership to show up at the scene of a disaster in order to assess damage first hand.”

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But Obama wasn’t entirely clueless, and he apparently predicted that his presidential record faced a terrifying and irreversible blight if he delayed a Louisiana visit for much longer. When a state suffers the deaths of 13 people and experiences crushing damage to approximately 40,000 floodwater-ravaged homes, it certainly is presidential for a leader to make his appearance in a show of solidarity and support.

“Now that the flood waters ravaging Louisiana are receding, it’s time for President Barack Obama to visit the most anguished state in the union,” Louisiana editor Peter Kovacs wrote in an editorial for The Advocate on Wednesday. “We’ve seen this story before in Louisiana, and we don’t deserve a sequel … It’s past time for the president to pay a personal visit, showing his solidarity with suffering Americans.”

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When CNN’s Kate Bolduan interviewed Kovacs on Thursday about his editorial criticism of the president, Kovacs stood his ground.

“I think when you need presidential leadership, you need presidential leadership. And when you sign up to be president, you know, you sign up for a 24/7 job,” Kovacs said.

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Obama’s reputation certainly wasn’t helped when Louisiana residents were informed of his administration’s politically correct advice to them from a 16-page memo released on Tuesday. The administration felt the need to warn them to avoid “unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin (including limited English proficiency)” in their emergency efforts in order to “highlight the importance of complying with nondiscrimination requirements of civil rights statutes, addressing the needs of the whole community, and ensuring equal opportunity to access recovery efforts.”

Louisiana resident Rod Dreher, a writer and editor at The American Conservative, lambasted Obama for his audacity and his distance.

“[E]verywhere you look you can find black folks and white folks loving on each other, helping each other through this crisis,” Dreher wrote on Thursday, calling the guidance a “long bureaucratic memo” issued by the “Department of Justice and many other agencies of the executive branch overseen by He Who Cannot Be Troubled to Leave Martha’s Vineyard.”

But for his own leadership and compassion in stark contrast, Trump received widespread gratitude and acclaim.

“Mr. Trump and Governor Pence have shown true leadership by visiting those devastated by the flooding in Louisiana. By bringing attention and aid to those affected, Mr. Trump has led by example and shown what we have come to expect from our nation’s leaders,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said in a statement, adding that Obama and Edwards should put “politics aside” in responding to a national disaster.

“The criticism by Louisiana’s governor is injecting partisan politics into a tragic national disaster. I refused to do that during Hurricane Sandy and I put the people of New Jersey first. Governor Edwards should do the same thing because the people of Louisiana deserve better,” Christie said. “President Obama should do what we did in New Jersey; put politics aside and put the victims first … The people of Louisiana deserve nothing less from the president.”

Obama apparently got that memo.