On Tuesday, Donald Trump traveled to Puerto Rico to address the humanitarian crisis wrought by Hurricane Maria, to paint a veneer of professionalism over his administration’s plodding response, and to repair the damage from his public feuds with local officials who have criticized the recovery effort. To recap, after saying nothing for days about the disaster, Trump finally began tweeting about Puerto Rico by initially blaming the island for its own problems and reminding the U.S. territory that it owes a lot of money to Wall Street. Over the weekend, he attacked the Mayor of San Juan for saying, accurately, that aid thus far had been inadequate and begging for more help. So it is perhaps unsurprising that Trump’s choreographed effort to signal his empathy for the people of Puerto Rico was a Category 5 train wreck.

Kicking off a news conference in San Juan, Trump couldn’t help but comment on how much Puerto Ricans, who have been without electricity and water for days, are costing the government. “Mick Mulvaney is here, right there, and Mick is charge of a little thing called budget. Now I hate to tell you Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack,” Trump said in what, at best, was a completely inappropriate joke. “Because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico.”

This of course, was merely a warm-up for the true highlight of Trump’s remarks, when he pushed back on comparisons between Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Katrina in the most insensitive way possible. “We’ve saved a lot of lives,” Trump said. “Every death is a horror. But if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with really a storm that was totally overpowering, nobody’s ever seen anything like this.” Then he turned to a local official and asked, “What is your death count as of this moment? 17? 16 people certified, 16 people versus in the thousands.” While the official death toll in Puerto Rico currently stands at 16, that number hasn’t been updated in six days, given the lack of electricity and communications. Experts say the number of victims is likely far higher, and will only become clear as the disaster recovery effort progresses.

Later, the president tossed a roll of paper towels into the crowd like he was at a sporting event where they shoot tee-shirts into the stands with air cannons.

Elsewhere, Trump veered into characteristic displays of stream-of-consciousness thinking, lurching from comments about the cost of the recovery to a feverish riff on the military’s new F-35 fighter jet, which he described, incorrectly, as a plane you “literally can’t see.”