Easter Egg Roll a Looming Catastrophe

Forget Syria and North Korea. The latest looming catastrophe for the Trump White House is the annual Easter egg roll, scheduled for this coming Monday. According to this article from Salon, it looks as if the administration may be dropping the ball on this event, which has gone on for more than a century - 138 years, to be precise.

Now I do realize that Salon is a partisan news outlet, and that there are many more important things going on in the world. Still, since the Poor Oppressed Christians who back Trump were incensed over Starbucks Christmas cups not bearing ancient symbols of their religion like snowmen and sleds, shouldn't it stand to reason that they would reserve the same level of stupid vitriol for an event based around venerable Christian symbols like rabbits and eggs?

Warnings and finger-nudges to get the White House moving are coming in from many of the working parts of the annual event. The supplier of the wooden eggs that are a party favor staple, sent a tweet out in February tagging the first family with a message: “Please reach out!”

@FLOTUS @realDonaldTrump @POTUS @MELANIATRUMP @IvankaTrump FYI manufacturing deadlines for the Easter eggs are near. Please reach out! pic.twitter.com/D78YqWVPBi

— Wells Wood Turning (@WellsTurning) February 20, 2017

Stephanie Grisham, Melania Trump’s communications director, told the Times, “Plans for the Easter Egg Roll are well underway, and the White House looks forward to hosting it.” But public schools in the Washington area have heard nothing from the White House, even though they are typically allocated up 4,000 tickets for children.

What about military families, which used to account for 3,000 tickets? “Unfortunately, the Trump administration has not reached out about it,” Ashley Broadway-Mack, the president of the American Military Partner Association told the Times. Congress members have also not been contacted about tickets for their constituents.

In fact, it's likely that this has little to do with Trump's political leanings and more to do with the fact that unlike previous presidents, he has not devoted much time or effort to staffing hundreds of positions at the White House that are still vacant. So these tasks may just not be getting done because there's nobody there to do them. That's why they call a presidential administration an "administration" and not "a guy with a Twitter account."

So it seems to me that Trump needs to get on this, ASAP. Not because an Easter egg roll is super-important in the overall scheme of things, but because it shows the need for staffers who should be on hand when a real crisis strikes. If the White House can't handle a simple public event like this one, what does that say about more pressing situations?