West Point sent students home and were unsure about having a graduation ceremony.

The Naval Academy, for its part, decided it was too risky to recall its nearly 1,000 graduating midshipmen to Annapolis, Md., for a commencement. Those graduates will have a virtual event. But the Air Force Academy, in contrast to the other schools, sent home its underclassmen, locked down its seniors on campus, moved up graduation, mandated social distancing — and went ahead with plans for Vice President Mike Pence to be its speaker.

And so last Friday, the day before Mr. Pence was to speak at the Air Force ceremony in Colorado, Mr. Trump, never one to be upstaged, abruptly announced that he would, in fact, be speaking at West Point.

Uh oh! West Point didn’t know that, so a mad scramble was necessary.

The academy had been looking at the option of a delayed presidential commencement in June, but had yet to complete any plans. With Mr. Trump’s pre-emptive statement, they are now summoning 1,000 cadets scattered across the country to return to campus in New York, the state that is the center of the outbreak.

Come back and risk death so that Trump can have yet another vanity opp.

West Point officials said this week that they were taken aback by the impromptu announcement. Of the many graduation options under review, Mr. Trump had pre-empted their planning.

Because his vanity is more important than their safety and health. His vanity is more important than anything.

General Williams said in a telephone interview that returning seniors would be tested off-campus for the coronavirus. Those who test negative will then be sent to the school, where they will be monitored for 14 days before graduation. While the campus has enough dormitory rooms for the 1,000 seniors, General Williams said that he was still deciding whether seniors would share bedrooms on their return.

“All 1,000 of them will not intermix,” he said. “They’ll be in their rooms. They’ll have their masks on. Groups will be segregated in the mess hall when they eat.”

In other words they’ll be summoned back into a dangerous area and then held prisoner for two weeks just so that Donald Trump can do another strut.

Some faculty say this is not only inconvenient to cadets, but it is also a risk to their mental well-being. It has been an academic year marred by tragedy even before the outbreak. One cadet was killed and 21 others injured last June after a military vehicle overturned en route to a training exercise near the academy. In October, a cadet killed himself.

Never mind all that, because Trump.