NewsNation describes Trump skipping dignified transfer of dead soldiers for LIV event as ‘golf diplomacy’

Conservative media critic Steve Krakauer suggested that President Donald Trump was “thinking a few chess pieces down the board” when he skipped the dignified transfer of four dead American soldiers to attend a Saudi-backed LIV Golf event at a Trump golf course, prompting a NewsNation anchor to applaud Krakauer’s analysis.

“Golf diplomacy, I like that,” Anna Kooiman reacted on Monday.

The president was on the receiving end of blistering criticism after he departed for his Mar-a-Lago estate on Thursday afternoon to attend a dinner with LIV golfers and a tournament over the weekend. Besides taking heat for sending Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in his stead to receive the remains of soldiers who were killed in a training accident, Trump was also lambasted for leaving Washington for a long weekend after his “Liberation Day” tariffs rocked international markets and created economic turmoil across the globe.

During his lengthy stay in Florida, Trump not only watched LIV golfers compete and played in a tournament at his own golf club, he also spoke at a $1 million-a-person fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago for his super PAC. The president’s weekend activities prompted New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman to claim that Trump “stopped caring about certain optics” a long time ago and that he’s now “going to do what he wants.”

During Monday’s broadcast of Morning in America, Kooiman — a former Fox News anchor who joined NewsNation last year — described Haberman as a “leading liberal New York Times journalist” before airing her recent comment about Trump skipping the dignified transfer to stay at Mar-a-Lago. She then asked Krakauer — the executive producer of Megyn Kelly’s podcast and a NewsNation media contributor — whether he agreed these were “bad optics” for the president.

“I’m not sure they’re bad optics,” he said. “I would say that what’s interesting about this is they are optics for sure. And you think about what could have been good optics, and it’s something that President Trump understands, perhaps, better than anyone is the idea of how optics drives the cycle.”

Stating that Trump likely wasn’t “going to win any credit on the PR side” from Haberman and other mainstream media outlets if he did attend the transfer of remains, Krakauer stated that Trump was conducting Middle East policy with his attendance at the LIV event.

“I do think that it was a little bit surprising because maybe he would have gone to this dignified transfer in another era, but right now, there’s so many different balls in the air when it comes to foreign policy, domestic policy and everyday is deciding what optics you have to just sort of decide what is the most important that moment,” he declared. “And I think he made it. He made the decision about — from a foreign policy point of view — to go to the Saudi event.”

After Kooiman stated that Haberman doesn’t “normally say glowing things about the president” anyway, she wondered what kind of media attention Trump could have received if he’d just gone to the transfer.

Saying that there “would not have been some positive news cycle for Trump” from legacy media, Krakauer said the president may have received favorable coverage from conservative outlets if he had attended. “I don’t think he needs that,” he added.

Instead, Krakauer asserted that Trump was playing multi-dimensional chess when it came to his Middle East policy before suggesting that the president had already connected with the families of the deceased soldiers.

“It’s not just optics,” he said. “He understands, I think, people in a way that most people don’t, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a day or two days down the road sometime this week, we get a little bit more about what may have happened between President Trump and those families themselves, whether behind the scenes or in front of the cameras.”

In the end, though, Krakauer insisted that Trump’s time spent hanging out with pro golfers and hitting the links was all part of the president’s diplomatic approach. With Kooiman saying that “this is different” because Trump could “get quite a bit of work done while he’s actually on the golf course,” Krakauer agreed.

“Exactly. He’s not just out there on the course,” he reacted. “As strange as it may sound about golf, this is diplomacy.”

Bringing up the potential merger of the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, Krakauer concluded by saying the merge could be about Trump wanting “to expand the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia” and that weekend’s events could “really move the needle” on the success of Trump’s foreign policy.

“Yeah, and as he’s saying 50 countries are…asking to come to the table to try to lower these tariffs,” Kooiman responded. “Golf diplomacy, I like that.”