Donald Trump’s response to Hurricane Harvey is so bad, even the Bush administration is slamming him for it
The response by President George W. Bush to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was so weak that it’s become a benchmark for how not to handle things. It was so weak that Bush never recovered politically. Yet Donald Trump’s response to Hurricane Harvey in 2017 has been so extraordinarily awful that even the Bush administration now feels comfortable slamming him for it.
George W. Bush’s White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who now works for Fox News, appeared on-air today to discuss Donald Trump’s handling of Harvey and the resulting flooding. Fleischer pointed out that Trump has yet to express any “empathy for the people who have suffered.” He added “the first thing he should have said was that his heart goes out to those people in Houston who are going through this, and that the government is here to help them to recover from this.”
Fleischer went on to point out that the entire point of a presidential visit to a disaster area is to provide that kind of sentiment. But instead, as we’ve been documenting throughout the day, Donald Trump has used his Texas visit to try to promote the hats that he’s selling for personal profit in his online store (link), and to brag about the crowd size that turned out for a speech he gave atop a firetruck (link).
Bush thoroughly flubbed his tactical and emergency response to Hurricane Katrina, but at the very least, he tried to talk a good game in terms of reassuring people. Up to now, that’s been seen as the worst-ever presidential response to a U.S. natural disaster. But at this point Donald Trump is finding ways to respond even more poorly to Hurricane Harvey. As flood waters continue to rise in Houston and shelters fill up, one can only hope Trump doesn’t find even more ways to screw this up.
