President Donald Trump has come up short time and time again during his time in the White House — including in responding to an array of natural disasters that have rocked the United States. That didn’t stop him from offering words of support for the victims of a recent tsunami in Indonesia, however.
This Sunday, he tweeted:
‘Unthinkable devastation from the tsunami disaster in Indonesia. More than two hundred dead and nearly a thousand injured or unaccounted for. We are praying for recovery and healing. America is with you!’
Ah yes, thoughts and prayers should do the trick.
Down here in reality, Americans continue to struggle through the aftermath of disasters that Trump has essentially dismissed. In California, essentially an entire town burned down, leaving some 86 people dead in the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history. Trump, meanwhile, chose to dismiss the disaster as the result of Californians not raking their forests enough and couldn’t even be bothered to get the name of the city right, calling it “Pleasure” while speaking to reporters.
For the record, the state of California only manages a tiny fraction of the state’s forest land, so Trump’s partisan attacks have essentially no merit.
Besides that disaster, Trump also handled the devastation in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria infamously poorly. He didn’t even take it seriously enough to acknowledge the dead, dismissing the official death toll as “fake news” drummed up by the Democrats as a political hit job.
No, Trump. Some 3,000 Americans died due to the effects of Hurricane Maria, period.
These issues don’t even cover Trump and the GOP’s infamous poor handling of other public health crises like gun violence and the opioid epidemic. Tens of thousands of Americans continue to lose their lives each year to those issues, and the best the Trump administration can come up with is to appoint Betsy “bears in schools” DeVos to lead a commission on school safety and suggest drug dealers should be executed.
So Trump can keep his thoughts and prayers.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
