Despite no one wanting him to come, Donald Trump traveled on Wednesday to El Paso, Texas, where a gunman killed 22 people over the weekend after posting an anti-immigrant manifesto that could’ve been cribbed from one of the president’s rallies. The purpose of the trip was to gin up some good press for Trump after he was largely blamed for inspiring the massacre, but, of course, the poster child for narcissistic personality disorder couldn’t keep it together and act like a human for more than a few minutes. Instead, he used a trip to the hospital where victims were being treated to lash out at Beto O’Rourke, calling the 2020 hopeful “crazy” and lying about one of his favorite subjects: crowd sizes. We know this thanks to a short video of the episode, uploaded by someone at the University Medical Center at El Paso. But apparently, if the president had had his way, there would have been way more footage of him mugging for the cameras and trashing political rivals as people lay dying.

The Washington Post reports that Trump threw a giant hissy fit on Air Force One because news cameras had not accompanied him in the hospital, causing coverage of the visit to be dominated by his foes. According to reporters John Wagner and Josh Dawsey, the president had wanted “pictures and video released immediately” and “asked aides to go defend him,” complaining that he had not gotten sufficient credit for his response to the shooting. (That may have had something to do with the fact that his response was to take zero responsibility for riling people up about an immigrant “invasion,” and to insist his mouth-foaming hate speech “brings people together.”) Yet what Baby Huey hadn’t realized was that the lack of cameras was by design, a plan hatched by nervous aides understandably worried that he wouldn’t be able to go two seconds without, well, acting like himself:

While the president’s aides explained to reporters that cameras were kept out of the hospital due to logistical and privacy concerns, two White House officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said there were concerns that they could capture an impolitic moment or the president making an insensitive comment.

Which, of course, is exactly what happened. A senior administration official subsequently characterized the trip as “not ideal,” which feels more like a way to describe a new hire’s request to push back their start date, or a roast chicken coming out dry, than a president’s decision to trash talk his opponents to hospital staffers who’ve spent the past four days trying to ensure people don’t succumb to injuries suffered in a mass shooting. In fact, the only way the visit could’ve been less ideal is if Trump had stood over a hospital bed making victims tell him who they voted for in 2016, and then offered one of his trademark pieces of mouth sewage. “This guy says didn’t vote for me,” you can practically hear him saying. “Probably wishes he did, but that’s okay, that’s alright. You know I could have him transferred to a shittier hospital. Not that I would do that, other presidents would’ve done that. I wouldn’t do that. Maybe I’d think about it but I wouldn’t do that.”

Luckily, it didn’t come to that: