President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump arrived in southeast Texas today to survey the damage and relief efforts there as the region continues to cope with the impact of Hurricane Harvey—but in keeping with his demeanor during most of his public appearances, the president was unable to address a crowd of residents without mentioning the size of the audience.
“What a crowd! What a turnout!” Trump remarked to a crowd of supporters in Corpus Christi who had come out to see him speak at a fire station after he met with local and state officials.
According to a media pool report, “Reporters heard no mention of the dead, dying or displaced Texans and no expression of sympathy for them.”
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As Think Progress noted following Trump’s appearance, “In all of his public statements since Harvey made landfall, Trump has mentioned the victims just once.”
He extended his “thoughts and prayers for those affected by Hurricane Harvey and the catastrophe of flooding and all of the other difficulties that they’re currently going through” at a press conference on Monday.
“But those brief remarks,” wrote Think Progress, “as of Tuesday afternoon, are the extent of his empathy.”
The rest of Trump’s statement at the fire station also focused largely on the historic nature of the storm and the size of the recovery operation. “We want to do it better than ever before,” he said. “We want to be looked at in five years, in 10 years from now as, this is the way to do it. This was of epic proportion.”
The tone matched the president’s frequent tweets on the storm:
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