"'It was on brand in the sense that Trump allowed his inner showman to make this a spectacle rather than a solemn moment of acknowledgment and a reflection — the way President Obama did'..."

"... said Ned Price, a CIA officer at the time of bin Laden’s death who later served as a spokesman for the National Security Council under Obama.... Obama spoke of the anguish of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, emphasized the nation’s resolve in recovering, and praised the skill of the intelligence experts who tracked bin Laden down and the courage of the Special Forces who killed him. He also took a measure of credit. 'I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice,' said a president who was routinely assailed by Republicans as weak and feckless on foreign affairs. He took no questions from reporters. By contrast, the Trump show on Baghdadi started with a tweet. 'Something very big has just happened!' the president posted on social media Saturday evening, and the White House media office quickly announced that Trump would make a 'major announcement' — 11 hours later at 9 a.m. Sunday. Critics speculated that the president was eager to upstage the Sunday morning political talk shows in a bid to drown out coverage of the House Democrats’ impeachment effort against him...."

From "In creating spectacle around Baghdadi’s death, Trump departs from Obama’s more measured tone on bin Laden" (WaPo).

In so many ways, Trump is not like Obama. But I presume that each man — on the success of a raid that killed a feared terrorist enemy — made a public display that he believed would advance American military interests and his own political interests. Obama chose to be circumspect and conventionally presidential. After hearing Trump, who was vividly emotional, I relistened to Obama's announcement, and I was struck by the restraint — the blandness. There was nothing about how bin Laden looked or acted as he faced his death. Obama seemed to want to inspire confidence that everything was done with precise correctness. Trump seemed to want us to experience the righteous anger and the vengeance and contempt. These are radically different choices from 2 very different men.

Remember that the Obama administration made a point of communicating with the world about the respectful treatment of bin Laden's corpse:

"Traditional procedures for Islamic burial was followed... The deceased's body was washed (ablution) then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased's body slid into the sea.''

And remember that Trump has openly talked about treating the enemy's bodies with outrageous disrespect:

"Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!," he tweeted. That was after "The United States condemns the terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, and will do whatever is necessary to help. Be tough & strong, we love you!"...

"They were having terrorism problems [in the Philippines], just like we do," Trump said, according to a February 2016 account in the Washington Post. "And he caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood — you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem. Okay? Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem."

That's quoted in a blog post of mine in August 2017. I commented:

[Trump] thinks its a good idea to let radical Muslim terrorists know we might mess with their dead bodies in a way that he (presumably) thinks they think will wreck their afterlife. He might think that threat will influence the terrorists, but not necessarily. He might just think that he had a cheeky tweet to entertain his fans and confound his MSM antagonists. 

Calling Trump on telephone — "He just picks up."

WaPo article about how Trump actually answers the phone. It's so weird when people do that.

The chatterbox in chief has eschewed the traditional way that presidents communicate with members of Congress, calling lawmakers at all hours of the day without warning and sometimes with no real agenda. Congressional Republicans reciprocate in kind, increasingly dialing up the president directly to gauge his thinking after coming to terms with the fact that ultimately, no one speaks for Trump but Trump himself.

“I never called President Bush or President Obama,” said [Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.)], who has served in the Senate since 2007. “I just feel comfort in calling President Trump. He calls me regularly to talk about issues. He’s always helpful for both of us.”

Longtime senators who have served through multiple administrations say they have never seen a president so easily accessible to lawmakers. The calls are part of what occupies the wide swaths of “executive time” on Trump’s schedule — an unstructured stretch of the day he uses to call allies and hold meetings that are otherwise not publicly announced.

Oh, no. They were so hoping he was watching Fox News in the "executive time."

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said one GOP senator who occasionally calls Trump, chuckling....

Trump regularly calls senators if he sees news about their states. Other times, he talks about what he just saw on television or asks about golf.....

Lawmakers rarely have to wait for Trump to return their calls — if they have to wait at all. “The vast majority, he just picks up,” said another GOP senator, who regularly calls Trump and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. “If he doesn’t . . . he’ll return them within an hour.”

Under Obama, calls with lawmakers were usually planned in advance.... “I cannot recall Obama phone bombing people for anything substantive,” the senior official said.

ADDED: I looked up "phone bombing" and got this recommended definition at Urban Dictionary:

When you, along with a few of your best bros, get together and decide to multilaterally mass text spam the fuck out of someone's phone to the point where their phone can no longer take it and just freezes. Sometimes done out of hate, but more often than not simply out of sheer enjoyment.

"You do love your dogs, don't you? I wouldn't mind having one honestly, but I don't have time. How would I look walking a dog on the White House lawn?"

Trump, in El Paso, last night.

"Would that be [makes a face] — right? — sort of not — right? I don't feel good. Feels a little phony — phony to me. People say, Oh, you should get a dog. Why? It's good politically. I said, That's not the relationship I have with my people."

Trump muses about having a dog at the White House, but concludes "it feels a little phony to me."

"That's not the relationship I have with my people... Obama had a dog." pic.twitter.com/xZTuMozOYk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 12, 2019

Someone in the crowd calls out "Obama!" Trump points at him, laughs, and says, "Yeah, Obama had a dog, you're right."

Perhaps the man in the crowd wanted Trump to riff on Obama's childhood acceptance of eating dog meat in Indonesia, but Trump only spoke of the dog Obama acquired as he entered the White House. Obama's dog acquisition really did seem to be a political move, and Trump could have gone on about the phoniness of Obama's dog specifically, but he moved on to another subject. He'd already made his point that White House dogs seem phony and acknowledged — I'm reading his face-making — that in his case walking around with a dog would look especially phony.

When I was listening to the speech last night, when Trump said "That's not the relationship I have with my...," I thought he was going to talk about relationships with pets and say something about not getting a pet that you are not committed to spending time with and treating as a fellow sentient creature. That's one reason not to get a pet.

But he said "That's not the relationship I have with my people." For a second, I thought he was calling dogs "people," then I realized he was going to a completely different place. He wasn't talking about what dogs deserve. He was criticizing the politicians who get dogs to influence how human beings think about them. It's phony. It's manipulation. And Trump doesn't do that.

We could talk about what Trump does do and whether any of it is phony, but, whatever, he doesn't do it with dogs. And maybe he only refrains from using a dog as a political prop because it just wouldn't work for him. It would just look wrong for him to walk around with a dog. That seems to be what he's thinking about as he makes those faces and gestures. GWB and Obama looked pretty sweet walking with their dogs. Trump is a showman, but that means he knows what shows to put on. And maybe he is just being himself, doing what comes from his true core, whatever that is. It's hard to think of his self-presentation as natural and purely self-expressive, but maybe in some weird way, it is.

This discussion makes me think of the old Coco Chanel aphorism: "Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve."

Nature didn't make his hair go like that or turn his skin orange. There's some unnatural stuff going on, but — at least theoretically — those things express the man. And that is what Chanel meant, that what you look like when you are old is what came from the inside.

Obama's photographer was "trying to make a point."

Meeting with top advisors. This is a full-frame picture. I guess you'd say I was trying to make a point.

A post shared by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Feb 6, 2017 at 9:29am PST

From a New York Magazine piece titled "Former Obama White House Photographer’s Instagram Is a Master Class in Shade" by Madison Malone Kircher, who obviously thinks Pete Souza is featuring these photographs now to put Trump in a negative light. But is it that easy? For example, in that photograph with the women, Kircher thinks it's a great comment on the lack of women in the Trump administration, but it had me thinking about the criticism Trump received over the message that women should "dress like women." The 3 women in that photo with Obama look like they got a memo requiring long skirts, no visible leg skin, and black high-heeled boots. It looks cool in the photograph, but not because it's a clear message that Obama is easy-going and egalitarian. It's ambiguous! (Which makes it better art.)

Then look at this photograph showing with Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, who also visited Trump last week. The caption is "Allies":

Allies.

A post shared by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Feb 13, 2017 at 12:50pm PST

Does that photograph clearly show the 2 men as equals? I see Trudeau dominating... maybe. It's ambiguous anyway. And congratulations to Souza for reusing his photographs with some style and subtlety.

IN THE COMMENTS: David said:

The two photos Souza put up were posed. So in that sense he is correct that they are accurate manifestations of the Obama White House.

It's quite arrogant of a man who was given a career making eight years of access to the office of the President and his private home to use those photos to disparage the next president. Souza was paid by the people of the United States while he had this matchless opportunity. He was part of the White House staff, who have a deservedly sterling reputation for serving every President with discretion and loyalty. Except Souza.

Another way to look at it is that Souza is acknowledging that his role was propagandist.