Cherry-picking photos requires that you understand what you’re looking at. Democrats seem to possess a pathological inability to see the value of getting down to work.

When I first saw this pair of photos pop up in my Facebook feed, I thought it had been posted by a conservative—and that it was an unfair comparison because the two photos were obviously taken at different points in the international meeting. I fully expect that there are photos of President Obama working, and photos of President Trump goofing off.

I turned out to be half right. I was very surprised to read further and discover that this was posted as anti-Trump and pro-Obama. My first impression was that the top photo looks like a kindergarten photo. The bottom photo looks like people working.

Denigrating a working photo and saying that everyone should always act like goofy happy kindergartners is, dare I say, how you got Trump in the first place.

The photo montage reminded me of a similar photo in California when Governor Schwarzenegger was running for re-election. That photo showed a sleezy used-car-salesman running against a strong, forceful Schwarzenegger. It turned out to be from the government unions, campaigning against Governor Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger won; I don’t know if the same will hold true of Trump in 2020, but if they keep with photos like this I wouldn’t be surprised. It shows a serious lack of introspection, a complete inability to recognize what other people see.

Democrats didn’t lose in 2016 because they lost the goofy class; they won that hands down. They lost because they lost the working class. Making fun of Trump because he looks like he not only is getting down to work but is convincing other world leaders to do the same seems like a losing strategy to me.¹

But there’s a stranger feel to these photos. The top photo is, because I’ve recently read After America^•, extraordinarily Eloi-like. The playfulness is goofy when compared to a working photo. They appear, in comparison, cluelessly unserious. To paraphrase Orwell paraphrasing Kipling, they can be that unserious only because other world leaders are working behind the scenes to make the world safe. And what these photos tell us is that those world leaders only work to make the world safe when President Trump is leading them.

The photos tell us that unlike his predecessor Trump is able to convince those leaders to work together instead of dancing through the fields while, one by one, the other Eloi drown and are carried downstream never to be seen again.

Trump is serious, Obama is not. This isn’t a hidden message in these photos; for Democrats and the left not to see that betrays an incredible projection on their part. They simply don’t have any sense that seriousness matters. People working and being serious is completely incomprehensible to the left, so they interpret it as something sinister.

The left has not yet taken their fascination with Eloi-dom to such an extent as to create a Morlock class. However, their reflexive disdain for the people whose work lets them be pathologically unserious can’t be helping. It is most obvious in their complete inability to understand that a good life can be lived without a college education; that much of the serious work in this country is performed by people without a college education. That learning to work means that there must be jobs available to teenagers and other just starting out.

Again with the Eloi analogy, they simply don’t see it. Such people are invisible, and their viewpoints—such as how they might see these photos—are completely alien to the Eloi class.