President Donald Trump couldn’t help but make fun of one of his own administration officials over his looks.
During a meeting with NASA’s Artemis II astronauts in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump, 79, fielded questions from reporters about the independent federal space agency, eventually coming to one he had to defer to his appointee.
“Are you considering relocating NASA’s headquarters out of D.C. once the lease is up? States like Texas, Ohio, and Florida have expressed interest,” one reporter asked the president, after Trump had asked her to repeat herself.
“Well, the best man to tell you that is the man standing right over here,” Trump said, looking to the agency’s administrator, billionaire investor Jared Isaacman.
Isaacman joined the Artemis II astronauts in the Oval Office on Wednesday. / Evelyn Hockstein / REUTERS
“You heard that question with those beautiful ears of yours?” the president wryly added about his appointee. “He’s got great hearing, you know. He’s, he’s got super hearing.”
Isaacman, 43, responded: “Trick of the trade, sir.”
The president embarrassed his NASA administrator by calling attention to his ears. / Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Neither the White House nor NASA immediately returned the Daily Beast’s requests for comment.
Isaacman, whose net worth exceeds $1 billion, was confirmed as NASA’s 15th administrator in December after Trump nominated him a second time following the withdrawal of his first nomination last May.
Isaacman went to space as part of SpaceX’s private Polaris Dawn mission. / Joe Skipper
The president had initially pulled his first nomination of the private astronaut because of his donations to prominent Democrats and his ties to Elon Musk, with whom Trump had been unfriendly at the time. However, the president ultimately renominated Isaacman in November.
The Artemis II mission saw pilot Victor Glover, commander Reid Wiseman, mission specialist Christina Koch, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen set the record for the farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth during their 10-day flyby of the moon earlier this month.
The Artemis II crew: Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, Reid Wiseman, and Victor Glover, pictured on April 7. / NASA
During the astronauts’ visit, the president also exploited an opportunity to make their monumental accomplishment about himself, talking about his own physical fitness.
“To get in there, you have to be very smart. You have to do a lot of things physically good,” the near-octogenarian said about being an astronaut. “So I would have had no trouble making it. I’m physically very, very good.”
“Maybe a little bit of a problem, I don’t know, Jared,” Trump added. “We’ll have to try it sometime. Is a president allowed to go up in one of these missions?”
“We can get working on that, Mr. President,” Isaacman replied.