Donald Trump has a knack for making himself the main event, even when he keeps a room full of people waiting.
Friday’s White House event took a strange turn when the president delayed a ceremony that wasn’t about him.
He arrived at the center about 30 minutes late, delaying the start of the Aug. 28 gathering.
Four astronauts who had flown farther from Earth than any humans in history were in Houston to receive the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
NASA staff filled the room at Johnson Space Center. The ceremony was set for 10 a.m., but everyone had to wait. But when he did, he made an entrance.
For anyone who watched Trump parade the same astronauts onstage like props back in July, the delay was the least of it.
Then he told a room full of NASA employees he didn’t want to speak to them.
Gesturing at the agency staff arranged behind him, Trump said he’d called them a good-looking group of people, then added that he didn’t like speaking with the people behind him because they looked too good.
“I looked at them before I came up. I said, ‘That’s a good looking group of people,” the POTUS recalled in the clip posted online.
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“I don’t like speaking with those people behind me, to be honest. They look too good. But they’re great people,” he continued.
But it didn’t end there. Trump then decided to single out a particular male in the crowd.
Unsurprisingly, he had a few words about this person’s appearance, too. “Great job, by the way,” Trump told him, as seen in another X post.
“Still a good-looking guy. You were always a good-looking guy. I think you’re better with the white hair, do you want to know the truth?” He ended it saying the individual looked better than he did 20 years ago.
Commenting on looks is nothing new with Trump. He previously told sailors aboard the USS George Washington in October that he’d never liked good-looking people, per Yahoo.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 28, 2026
But delivered at a medal ceremony, standing in front of the workforce being honored, it landed a little differently.
Online, most people weren’t watching Trump at all. They were watching the faces behind him. “The people behind him just holding on for dear life,” wrote one person in the comment section of an X post. “Those are the blankest faces I have ever seen,” another wrote.
Elsewhere, one user offered a theory: “It’s like they made an agreement beforehand to not move or make a sound.” Another then wrote: “I guarantee those people all wish they were back in space.”
And on the “too good looking” line specifically, one person delivered the reply that traveled furthest: “I’m certain the feeling about not wanting to speak with him is mutual.”
One commenter raised a fair question. “Just curious, how does a president award a congressional medal to people,” one asked. “Isn’t that for Congress to do?”
Congress actually authorized the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. But the law puts it in the president’s hands to award, which is why Trump was the one holding it.
Artemis II launched April 1 and touched down April 10. Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen spent 10 days flying around the moon.
They became the first humans beyond Earth’s orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972 and traveled farther from Earth than anyone ever has.
The medals were eventually handed out. Wiseman, Glover, Koch and Hansen each got theirs, shook hands, and stood for photos.
Trump did credit the wider team, saying the astronauts hadn’t done it alone and saluting the engineers, scientists and launch specialists at NASA. He also signed an executive order establishing a U.S. Space Academy. But his speech kept wandering.
He brought up his late uncle John Trump, an MIT professor, and said the man loved space, before framing his own interest as inherited, telling the room it was something the family had genetically. It echoed remarks he’d made 11 days earlier praising a teenage lifeguard’s “good genetics.”
He reached for an applause line about Space Force and got very little back. Trump then pivoted to the stock market and foreign investment figures in front of a room of scientists, to silence.
This wasn’t the first awkward encounter between Trump and this Astronaut crew though.
In April, he’d called the crew while they were still in orbit, and after he finished talking, the astronauts simply went quiet. There was roughly a minute of dead air on the livestream. He blamed a glitch.
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Trump hosted all four astronauts in the Oval Office on April 29, praising their courage. They stood silently behind him, watching as he turned the moment back to himself.
He said the program required intelligence and physical ability, adding that he would have had “no trouble” making it because he’s “physically very, very good.” He followed up by asking whether a president is allowed to go up on one of these missions.
