Pete Souza's latest Instagram reminds Donald Trump how presidents should act during disasters
Pete Souza wants to remind the world that not all leaders respond to natural disasters by bragging about crowd size and ratings.
Sure, Donald Trump talked about those stats when he visited Texas to get briefed on Tropical Storm Harvey relief efforts, but as Souza highlights in a new Instagram post, the focus should on helping others.
The former White House photographer shared a photograph on Wednesday of Obama embracing a Sandy victim, comparing the former president's actions to Trump's in the caption.
"At a time like this, it shouldn't be about selling baseball hats or commenting on crowd size. It's about helping our fellow Americans," he wrote.
The caption is a direct reference to Trump's Tuesday trip to Texas. He and Melania (both sporting USA and FLOTUS baseball caps) stopped in Corpus Christi, where Harvey made landfall, and Austin.
There, in between discussing relief efforts, Trump took the time to marvel at crowd size and even announce that a FEMA administrator had "become very famous on television over the last couple of days."
After a White House pool report noted that reporters on-site "heard no mention of the dead, dying, or displaced Texans and no expression of sympathy for them," and that "The message was services are coming and Texans will be OK," comparisons to past presidential disaster responses began.
Photographs of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama — all meeting with and personally consoling natural disaster victims in the past — began circulating on social media in an effort to condemn Trump's overly formal and seemingly insensitive behavior.
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In the afternoon Souza shared another photograph of Obama greeting those affected by an F5 tornado in Joplin, Missouri back in 2011.
The post was captioned with the following quote from Obama:
"But that does not mean we are powerless in the face of adversity. How we respond when the storm strikes is up to us. How we live in the aftermath of tragedy and heartache, that’s within our control. And it’s in these moments, through our actions, that we often see the glimpse of what makes life worth living in the first place."
If Trump really wants to Make America Great Again, he might want to take some notes from his predecessors.
UPDATE: Aug. 30, 2017, 12:39 p.m. UTC Updated to include another Instagram post from Pete Souza.
Topics Instagram Barack Obama Politics
Nicole is a Senior Editor at Mashable. She primarily covers entertainment and digital culture trends, and in her free time she can be found watching TV, sending voice notes, or going viral on Twitter for admiring knitwear. You can follow her on Twitter @nicolemichele5.
