President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

The president, wearing a broad smile and a blue windbreaker with the presidential seal on Saturday, said shelter residents had given the recovery effort, and him, good reviews. “They’re really happy with what’s going on,” he told the reporters. “It’s something that’s been very well received. Even by you guys, it’s been very well received.”

He added, “Have a good time, everybody!” ...



The reaction inside the shelter to Mr. Trump’s visit was mostly positive, with a quieter undercurrent of anxiety and skepticism.

“Is he going to help? Can he help?” asked Devin Harris, 37, a construction worker. “I lost my home. My job is gone. My tools are gone. My car is gone. My life is gone. What is Trump going to do?”

Upbeat Trump Returns to Texas to Meet With Storm Victims

 

Mr. Trump was in an optimistic, nearly exuberant mood during a stop at the NRG Center, a convention building converted into a temporary shelter housing 1,200 children and adults displaced by the waters. Touring the facility with television cameras in tow, Mr. Trump threw his arms around storm survivors — and they hugged him back — while posing for selfies and hoisting one young girl in ponytails in his arms.

 

Trump wanted to say, "Congratulations on your struggles," but it would have been poor form in Ted Cruz's backyard.

 

This is the thing. Political convention forces Presidents to do disasters incorrectly. They are supposed to be on the scene in the immediate aftermath, when really all they can do is get in the way, because it makes pretty pictures for TV and its pathos festival. The time for them to be there is a few weeks or even a month later, when the nation's ADD has caused the disaster to become back page news, but when the people affected are still really having a hard time, and when government help and increased public attention would be most helpful. It's not just Trump, this is something I've noticed for years. It's all TV. There were big hurricanes when I was a kid, too, but nobody expected Ike or JFK to show up at a shelter. The President was supposed to be back in Washington making sure people were able to get the hell out of the shelters as quickly as possible.

 

That's great! Now do health care again.

 

The crazy thing about "It's all TV" is that the reality of a President Trump is a television creation, perhaps more than anything else, and for a person who thinks everything is a TV show, about ratings, he not only can't make that work in his favor, he cannot not suck at it. This is requiring him to appear to be a decent human being, and he just can't act his way through that. I don't mean five seconds here, 10 seconds there. I mean overall, since this thing started. In a context where it's all TV, someone who used television to make himself seem to be what he is not, he just can't sustain the act when it's for real.

 

Good for him. Those kids have been through something awful and they get to meet the freaking president of the United States. This stuff might be symbolic or political theater but if it buoys the spirits of the people affected then I applaud it.

 

Yeah, big fucking deal. You get to shake hands with a pervert.

 

Oh, Starmannnnnnnnn ...

 

Without the filter of the mainstream media... people like Trump: