Oops.
The Governor of Louisiana warned Donald Trump not to visit the flooded disaster area of the state if he was only coming for a photo op, which would have created a traffic jam and diverted law enforcement away from helping with the recovery effort. So instead Trump showed up with a small truck of supplies and proceeded to spend a total of forty-nine seconds handing out those supplies before giving up and leaving. Worse, the “supplies” he handed out to flood victims were cartons of Play-Doh. No, seriously.
Photos of Donald Trump taken by those on the scene and posted to social media reveal that Donald Trump spent less than a minute handing out supplies – just 49 seconds according to at least one bystander – and he more or less just handed the supplies to Mike Pence the whole time. But in a storyline so strange that it wouldn’t be believable if there weren’t photographic evidence, Trump was
literally handing out the children’s toy Play-Doh, as if that were of any help to those people in Louisiana who had just lost their homes or livelihoods to flooding.
When Trump wasn’t busy spending a few seconds handing boxes of glorified clay to the survivors of a tragedy, he was seen
signing autographs> for random people, and tying up the first responders who had been tasked with the recovery effort.
In other words, Donald Trump took an already bad situation in Louisiana and made it harmfully and embarrassingly worse for his own personal amusement. Some might argue that it’s a metaphor for what he’s spent the past year doing to the Republican Party. Trump had an opportunity to make the Louisiana situation work for him – but the optics of how he conducted himself have likely erased any perceptual advantage he might have gained if he’d done it thoughtfully.
