What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried very hard to make sure as few people as possible heard him get booed.

Trump attended part of the men's finals match between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz at the US Open today in Queens, after networks and event organizers scrambled to find ways to prevent footage of him being booed by the crowd from being televised or reported on. 

Presidents—even ones that are much more popular than Trump is now—tend to get heckled at public events. But Trump is unusually sensitive to that kind of thing, and goes out of his way to appear only before audiences whose reactions he can fully control, like military personnel, pre-screened supporters, or his own paying customers at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump made a tentative foray out into view of the crowd when the arena was no more than 10% full and was immediately booed. As the prearranged PR plan dictated, he didn't reappear until the playing of the National Anthem, when a loud torrent of boos coincided exactly with the few seconds his face appeared on the stadium's screens.

 

 

The match was delayed by half an hour because most of the paying crowd was stuck outside being screened by the Secret Service. Even with the delay, the seats were only about half full when play started. The cheapest tickets cost about $600 per seat.

Trump, as he usually does, gave his approximation of a salute during the anthem rather than hold his hand over his heart. It's a free country—he could also burn an American flag in protest if he wanted to, no matter what his own executive orders on the subject say—but the U.S. flag code says that only military personnel in uniform should salute. (Trump dodged the Vietnam draft when he was of age to serve, and has spoken derisively of the "suckers and losers" who died in military service to the country.)

Why does this matter?

• No one this emotionally fragile is fit to be president. 

• Having footage of Americans booing you censored doesn't mean Americans didn't boo you. 

• Whatever Trump got out of seeing a few minutes of a tennis match, it probably wasn't worth thousands of actual fans who'd paid hundreds of dollars each missing the first set.