“This was of epic proportion,” he said. “No one has ever seen anything like this.” He added: “This recovery is going to be frustrating. We're going to be here to navigate you through it.”

Other presidential comments were headscratchers, like saying of Harvey: “It sounds like such an innocent name, Ben, right, but it’s not innocent.”

Hurricanes are, of course, major media events, and if there’s one thing that fascinates Trump, it’s television spectacles and ratings. Trump called out FEMA Administrator Brock Long, who “really has become very famous on television in the last couple of days.”

Something strange happened during Trump’s visit by a fire department in Corpus Christi. According to pool reporter David McSwane of the The Dallas Morning News, “Trump did an impromptu rally type speech in front of a few hundred Trump supporters who somehow managed to know exactly where the president was doing the briefing.” Trump reveled in the audience—“What a crowd, what a turnout”—and he again struck a tone of supportiveness: “I love you, you are special, we're here to take care of you. It's going well.”

What Trump didn’t do much of was mourning the dead, from the ordinary civilians killed in the storm to Houston Police Sergeant Steve Perez, who drowned on the job. Nor did the president spend a lot of time hugging waterlogged homeowners. Trump loves the rah-rah cheerleading that comes with disaster duty, but displays of sympathy and empathy just don’t seem to come naturally to him, at least in public settings. Like many presidents, Trump has a clear mean streak; unlike most presidents, he’s been happy to show it publicly. He loves to attack, he loves to joust, and he loves to lecture, but he doesn’t seem to feel as comfortable talking about the softer emotions.

One notable exception comes to mind. Trump often speaks sympathetically when recalling Kate Steinle, a woman shot and killed in San Francisco in 2015 by an unauthorized immigrant, and other people killed or injured by unauthorized immigrants. During the campaign, his discussion of these people were often among the most emotional moments of his rallies. A cynic might argue that this was disingenuous, and that he was simply speaking about these people in the service of bashing immigrants, but for the purposes of this discussion, that’s irrelevant: The point is that when he wishes to do so, Trump is able to perform sympathy on the public stage.

But in the case of Harvey, Trump has thus far not decided to do so. Speaking to the press, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that he had seen “genuine compassion” from Trump as they reviewed the damage. “The president was heartbroken about what he saw,” Abbott said. In the absence of any public display, Abbott’s testimony would have to suffice.