Donald Trump arrived in Texas, gave a briefing at a fire station, and told Texans, “This is a really special place and a special state.”

So far, so relatively normal. Straight afterwards, however, several hundred Trump supporters arrived and the US president proceeded to give them a speech that seemed curiously indifferent to the plight of the tens of thousands of people made homeless by Hurricane Harvey, which has caused record-breaking rain and catastrophic flooding.

Presidential events are often reported on by one journalist picked from among the White House correspondents, whose “pool report” is then shared among the rest of the press corps. Normally, language in pool reports is brisk, factual, and dispassionate. For this one the pool reporter happened to be from a Texas paper, the Dallas Morning News, and what they heard was apparently enough to prompt a remarkable shift from normal pool custom.