How does a “wartime president” spend his days?

He doesn’t spend them tweeting petty, petulant attacks against his political foes. The way I always have understood the term “wartime president,” he focuses tightly on the task at hand, which is to defeat the “enemy” with which he is at war.

Along the way, the “wartime president” unifies the nation. He speaks to our higher ideals. He puts partisan differences aside and offers words of measured wisdom.

How is Donald John “Tweeter in Chief” Trump doing as a “wartime president”? Not well … at all!

The enemy he once declared was “under control” now has killed 80,000 Americans. The coronavirus pandemic that Donald Trump once dismissed as not a serious threat to Americans has become, um, a deadly threat.

Trump called himself a “wartime president” in the mold, I suppose, of Presidents Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and for good measure, let’s throw in George W. Bush.

That’s where the comparison ends.

Trump has busied himself with Twitter messages that deal with everything but the “war” that has spiraled out of control on his watch. He attacks his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, the media, Democrats in general, even some Republican conservatives. Trump hurls blame at every target imaginable for the pandemic that is showing no sign at all of letting up. He castigates Democratic governors.

Trump’s primary focus is on his re-election.

A “wartime president” by all rights shouldn’t have the amount of time Trump spends bellowing about matters that have nothing to do with the fight. Donald Trump is, as fellow Republican Mitt Romney once described him, a “phony and a fraud.”