TRUMP LET A KID MOW THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN. IDIOT ASKS: WHAT ABOUT CHILD LABOR LAWS?
Frank Giaccio, an 11-year-old kid from Falls Church, Virginia, wrote a note to President Trump saying he admired his business sense and had a business of his own: He mows lawns, $8 a pop. But it would be his “honor to mow the White House Lawn” as a volunteer.
And he got the gig!
So now there are pictures of him all over the Internet, mowing the Rose Garden lawn on September 15. And while he’s doing it, out comes the president to shake his hand. Giaccio tells the president he wants to be a Navy Seal someday and it’s a giant feel-good story.
There, Steven Greenhouse, former New York Times labor reporter and author of the book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, tweeted that the administration was “Not sending a great signal on child labor, minimum wage & occupational safety” by having a “10-year-old volunteer mow its lawn.”
As you might imagine, critics were somewhat dumbfounded (to put it mildly) that Greenhouse was treating this one-off photo op as if it were a policy statement. The words “Debbie Downer” appeared in at least one response. So did some other names. Thankfully, other people reminded Greenhouse that it is good for kids to mow lawns. Plenty of them spent their own childhoods mowing lawns.
Greenhouse countered by recommending they all read an article on how dangerous lawn-mowing is for kids. So I read it. I immediately recognized the name of the doctor who did the research: Dr. Gary Smith at Nationwide Hospital. “Nationwide” as in the insurance company that featured a dead kid in its Super Bowl ad a few years back.
This photo-op is such a pretty nifty small win all around for Trump; it humanizes him next to the 11-year old kid and by reminding voters how much PR Giaccio is going to get now that he can use this in his marketing efforts. Having Giaccio at the White House wanting to promote his business contrasts Trump with Obama trolling America via “clock boy” last year. And the White House PR team had to know when they scheduled it that someone in the DNC-MSM would find some way of freaking out – Trump could say “Nice day today,” and a lefty scold would shout, “But what about global warming???!!!!”
The former Timesman’s freakout over the kid mowing the White House lawn occurred the same day that Brooke Baldwin of CNN dived for the fainting couch over Clay Travis’s “First Amendment and boobs” crack. The same weekend that Colbert’s Emmys were hyper-politicized. The same weekend that Jerry Brown called Trump voters “troglodyte” cave dwellers. Apparently, Brown doesn’t seem to care that he’s just insulted 4.5 million of his constituents in California.
In the 1960s, the left was first cool – think JFK, Brando, Sinatra and Miles Davis, and later hip, with the Beatles, the Stones and Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. Today, they’re humorless PC scolds, tut-tutting anyone having fun – and that’s not a good look for anyone.
