Walk and chew gum at the same time?

Reader question:

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says “President Trump can walk and chew gum at the same time”. What does that mean?

My comments:

It means US President is lacking in terms of focus. He cannot concentrate on anything. He cannot do one thing without being distracted by another.

I’m kidding. I’m pulling your leg.

Leavitt means it as a compliment. She means to say that Trump can walk properly while chewing gum – the latter activity being no hindrance to the President.

And what does that mean, then?

All kidding aside, it just means that Trump can do two or more things at the same time. In other words, he can dual task or multitask. He’s like a juggler who can rotate three or more balls in the air.

To literally walk (properly) and chew gum suggests that one has good coordination. And that’s what Leavitt means literally.

Figuratively, Leavitt means to suggest that Trump can launch a war on Iran, keep Latin America under the thumb while maintaining law and order in the United States and, you know, generally Making America Great Again (MAGA).

You know, something like that.

Whether he can really do it or is just making a mess of everything he touches is not what we’re concerned with here. So we have to be satisfied with just getting another neat little American idiom under our belt.

To walk and chew gum at the same time is, in short, to multitask, to do (and, hopefully excel at) two or more things at the same time.

And here are media examples:

1. There have always been women like Margaret Thatcher in power. Never more than one or two at a time, of course. Thatcher was the embodiment of what Katha Pollitt memorably called “the Smurfette syndrome,” which is when “a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined.” She was not a feminist icon, nor any kind of feminist, as she took pains to remind people. “Some of us were making it before women’s lib was even thought of,” she once sniffed. To make it any more obvious, she might as well have literally kicked the ladder out from under her.

For decades, Thatcher’s gender provided some public relations cover for her most noxious politics. That was true even today in the White House’s statement on her death, which included the following treacly sentence: “As a grocer’s daughter who rose to become Britain’s first female prime minister, she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered.”

Leaving aside for a moment the particulars of what Thatcher did once she shattered that ceiling – on which there will be much to say – what sort of example did Thatcher provide to “our daughters”? It was a model that studiously projected traditional femininity while behaving in a brutally uncompromising fashion. The most vivid example of this was the time that she slammed her famous handbag down on a table at a meeting and snapped, “I haven’t much time today, only enough time to explode and have my way.”

It wasn’t all ladylike veneer, of course. When Thatcher banned free school milk for children in primary schools over the age of 7, earning her the nickname “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher,” she was the living opposite of a nurturing mother. And the pearls could only take her so far when “Ditch the Bitch” was considered a viable slogan. This, by the way, was a bridge too far for British feminists who could walk and chew gum at the same time – that is, deride her policies while condemning sexism against her. “Sexist abuse such as bitch, cow and other less printable epithets make many women trade unionists feel they are outsiders in a movement that has such feelings of hatred towards Thatcher purely as a woman,” wrote Fightback for Women’s Rights, a group associated with the Labour Party, in an open letter in 1980.

By the same token, it’s possible to have the following measured approach to what Thatcher did for women’s representation in power: It’s better to have women in public life, even when we vehemently disagree with them, than to have no women in public life at all. Every single one counts toward the normalization of women in charge, however abhorrent their policies. Thatcher herself was a necessary rebuke to essentialism, to the humanity-constricting idea that women are inherently more collaborative, peaceful or nurturing. Bella Abzug once said, “Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.” She was talking about female mediocrity, but the same goes for female wrongness.

- Thatcher: A female icon, but not a feminist one, by Irin Carmon, Salon.com, April 8, 2013.

2. As expected, the Los Angeles Lakers are likely to be aggressive in upgrading at center this offseason, according to ClutchPoints’ Anthony Irwin.

Irwin reported president of basketball operations Rob Pelinka “has been especially active” already, and he has emphasized the Lakers “need centers, plural.”

Los Angeles had a void in its frontcourt before it traded Anthony Davis to the Dallas Mavericks. The problem only got worse once he left and the deal for Charlotte Hornets big Mark Williams fell through.

Irwin spoke to an executive from an Eastern Conference team who said Pelinka is at a disadvantage because everyone knows he wants a center and will pay big for one. The Lakers were prepared to send rookie wing Dalton Knecht, veteran Cam Reddish, a 2031 first-round pick and a 2030 pick swap to Charlotte for Williams.

“The problem Rob is running into is that anyone who has a big who can walk and chew gum is going to start talks with Dalton and a first, then go up from there if their center can actually play,” the anonymous exec said.

Free agency is unlikely to be fertile ground for L.A. The team has a $191.6 million payroll before factoring in any new additions, and the market tails off pretty quickly once you get past Myles Turner and Naz Reid.

That leaves a trade as the best option.

The stars aligned perfectly for Pelinka to get Luka Doncic, a young cornerstone talent who can anchor the organization when LeBron James retires. He’s probably not going to be that fortunate again with his pursuit of a center.

- Lakers Reportedly ‘Especially Active’ Eyeing Centers on Trade Market amid NBA Rumors, BleacherReport.com, May 29, 2025.

3. So, Donald Trump held this massive roundtable Friday night to try and fix college sports in the age of NIL. There were a billion people, from all walks of life, on hand.

Nick Saban was there. Urban Meyer. Tebow. Adam Silver. Clay had a seat at the table. It was a who’s who of roundtables. The wokes, of course, were furious. Awful Announcing, which is just insufferable, called it “masturbatory,” which is a term I hadn’t heard in a long time. Kudos to them. Impressive. Fair is fair.

Anyway, while it was a bit odd, given there’s a war going on in the Middle East, I’m not here to break down the Xs and Os of a college sports roundtable. Trump can walk and chew gum at the same time, I assume, so he’s free to conduct whatever business back home that he’d like. He’s an adult.

I will, however, break down this emasculating moment between one reporter and the president that might just be the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen.

Frankly, it makes me uncomfortable, and I wasn’t even in the room! OutKick’s Trey Wallace was, by the way, so read this after you’re done watching THIS:

Reporter: As you know, my son Joe is a college baseball player…

Trump: How would I know that? He said “as you know” – I don’t even know who the guy is.

Goodness gracious. What a moment. It had to be just so debilitating for this poor reporter. I don’t use the term “poor reporter” a lot, because I generally despise Big Js, but this one made me sad. The guy is just proud of his son, has clearly spoken to Trump about him before, and Trump just completely brushed it aside.

To be fair, the man does have a lot of things going on right now – and he meets a thousand people a day – but still. It’s a tough scene. He’s sitting there thinking his Maryland relief pitcher boy is about to become a household name because maybe Trump will acknowledge him, and then BAM – public humiliation instead. Just brutal stuff. Sometimes you just have to take it on the chin if you’re on the receiving end of one of these things.

This, unfortunately, is one of those times.

- Donald Trump Humiliates Reporter Over His College Baseball Son In An Absolutely Brutal Scene, by Zach Dean, OutKick.com, March 7, 2026.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）