The New York Times is quite worried that President Trump may have awarded Tiger Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom as a reward because Trump’s company that builds golf courses partnered with the No. 1 golfer in the world to build a golf course:

Since the awarding of these medals to possibly reward a supporter in exchange for post-presidency opportunities is a legit issue, we must have missed the New York Times’ article on its concern that President Obama awarded Medals of Freedom to Bruck Springsteen and Stephen Spielberg and then used their names to then raise money for his library in Chicago:

Aspects of the center’s design will provide space to take advantage of Obama’s famous friends, including “a studio where I can invite Spike Lee or Stephen Spielberg to come and do workshops on how to make films around the stories that young activists are working on,” as well as “a music recording studio where I can invite Chance (the Rapper) or Bruce Springsteen, depending on your taste, to come here and talk about how you can record music that has social commentary and meaning.”

Oprah Winfrey and Tom Hanks got medals, too, which probably had nothing to do with how they ended up vacationing with the Obamas on billionaire Richard Branson’s yacht in Tahiti. It’s not like these Hollywood connections would come in handy as the Obamas negotiated their huge Netflix deal or anything:

Last month, they vacationed in the South Pacific, where paparazzi snapped photos of the former president taking a photo of his wife. They were aboard a yacht during a getaway with friends Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey and Tom Hanks.

“Is this what’s going on with social media that Oprah and I cannot go on a billionaire’s boat to Tahiti with a former President of the United States and not keep it secret for God sakes?” Tom Hanks joked in a recent appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Rober De Niro also got a medal from Obama in 2016. De Niro, coincidentally, was also one of the president’s biggest Hollywood supporters!

Working as an actor his entire life means that De Niro sees everything through that lens. In describing his steadfast support for Barack Obama, he compares the president’s challenges to a filmmaker’s. “He’s a good person, period,” he says. “He’s trying his best. He’s going to do things that people feel are not right or violating one right or another. But at the end of the day, he represents, I think, the best of the type of people that I would like to see running the government. He has to play that game, the political game. They all do. They make statements they can’t honor because they’re impossible to honor. Once you get into that Washington machinery, you’ve just got to figure it out and swim against the current and grab onto this rock and that, and just try to maintain your course.”

Now, does anyone want to check and see how much money Obama’s Medal of Freedom winners donated to his campaign and to his library? This could be a good article for some enterprising firefighter to write!

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