Donald Trump blows his second Texas flood visit by congratulating people and bragging about his hand size

| 6:59 pm EDT September 2, 2017
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Donald Trump’s first post-flooding visit to Texas came across as so tone-deaf and opportunistic that he essentially asked for a do-over today when he decided to head back to the state for the second time this week. Unfortunately for Trump, he still didn’t seem to understand why he was there or what he was supposed to be saying to the people on the ground. As such he ended up botching his second visit in even more egregious fashion.

When Trump visited a Texas storm shelter today, he was speaking to traumatized people who have temporarily or permanently lost their homes. So Trump’s message to them was at least a little off the mark when he said “Things are working out well” and that the recovery effort has been a “wonderful thing” (link). Trump then took things further by saying “congratulations” to FEMA workers while he was speaking to the people in the shelter. Things got worse from there.

At one point, while Donald Trump was submitting to the customary presidential task of serving food to those in the shelter, he blurted out “My hands are too big” (link). Trump has a well documented decades-long inferiority complex about the size of his hands, which culminated when he used a Republican primary date to assure the crowd that neither his hand size nor his anatomy was small. Yet now, while he was supposed to be comforting people who have just lost everything, he was once again trying to bring hand size into it.

Context matters, of course. Donald Trump didn’t appear to be purposely trying to make the people in the storm shelters feel bad with the tone-deaf things he was saying. But considering the circumstances, he shouldn’t have been saying any of the above things to those people, in any context. By going back to Texas for a second time, Trump unwittingly proved that he’s incapable of understanding empathy, or even faking it. He’d have done better to simply stay home.