On Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump decamped to Pittsburgh in order to personally pay his respect to the 11 people slain in the horrific mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. Joined by Melania Trump, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, his tribute, on some level, appeared to follow the traditional presidential protocol for honoring the memory of Americans tragically felled by an ungodly act of terror or natural disaster. Inside the synagogue, the president listened to the congregation’s rabbi as he detailed what happened over the weekend. Trump and the First Lady lit a candle for each victim. He lay stones and flowers from the White House gardens on memorials set up outside Tree of Life before traveling to a local hospital where survivors of the shooting were being treated.

But the usual, solemn role of the president as comforter in chief played out much different this week. President Trump made no public speech. No state or national political leaders joined him, despite his invitations. (Both Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell cited scheduling conflicts, as did Pennsylvania’s Republican senator, Pat Toomey. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer also turned down an invitation.) In fact, local officials asked the president to postpone. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto had explicitly asked Trump not to come on Tuesday. He suggested that the president delay his visit until after the funerals, so as not to divert resources from overseeing a collective mourning and the sort of security measures required after an act of domestic terrorism. “We do not have enough public safety officials to provide enough protection at the funerals and . . . at the same time draw attention to a potential presidential visit,” he said on Monday. “All attention should be on the victims.”

Tom Wolf, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, who is up for re-election next week, asked advisers about whether or not to attend, according to three people who spoke with him. “It wasn’t about partisan politics,” one of these people said. “The meeting was so ill-timed and about [Trump’s] narcissism. He could have listened to what the mayor said, come in three days when people weren’t literally being buried, and sat Shiva privately with the families without taking away attention and resources. So the decision was how do these politicians—from both sides, by the way—not upset a head of state, but, more importantly, not upset the community. They sort of decided to just politely not show up.”

Meanwhile, thousands of community members were hoping he wouldn’t come at all, unless and until Trump was willing to denounce the sort of hateful rhetoric that he has condoned since he began campaigning more than three years ago. By the time Trump touched down in Pittsburgh, more than 70,000 people had signed an open letter composed by Bend the Arc, a local progressive Jewish group, declaring that Trump would not be welcomed in the city until he denounced white nationalism and stopped “targeting” minorities in his bombast and policies. Trump has faced criticism from members of the Jewish community for years. In the summer of 2016, after he re-tweeted an anti-Semitic image featuring Hillary Clinton, New York Observer writer Dana Schwartz lambasted Trump for what she called “a winking promise to this nation’s worst and most hateful individuals,” calling on Kushner, who owned the paper and whose paternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors, to take a stand. (Kushner responded in an op-ed defending his father-in-law.) Last summer, the president sent chills through the community after his equivocal “both sides” response to the neo-Nazi uprising in Charlottesville, which nearly led then-national economic adviser Gary Cohn to resign. The Tree of Life shooter, himself, invoked #MAGA before undertaking his heinous atrocity.