As mass shootings have become commonplace in this country, Americans have grown used to seeing their presidents try to play a healing role. It’s a norm that Trump’s predecessors helped cultivate. Former President Barack Obama built his legacy partly on his memorable response to gun violence. The day of the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting in December 2012, he teared up while addressing the press about the massacre of schoolchildren. Three years later, he led mourners in singing “Amazing Grace” while giving a eulogy for the pastor killed at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina.

In Littleton that day in 1999, Clinton delivered a speech designed to soothe the community, closing with a story about Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader who became South Africa’s first black president after serving nearly three decades in prison. Mandela was filled with anger over his confinement, but resolved never to surrender to his jailers his “mind and his heart.” Looking out at students who had heard the gunshots at Columbine and seen their classmates fall, Clinton said: “I see here today that you have decided not to give your mind and your heart away. I ask you now to share it with all your fellow Americans.”

Republican President George W. Bush gave a short and powerful speech at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, after the 2007 mass shooting on campus that left 32 people dead. One day after the violence, Bush traveled to the school to speak at a memorial service held in the basketball arena. “People who have never met you are praying for you. They’re praying for your friends who have fallen and who are injured,” Bush said. “There’s a power in these prayers—real power. In times like this, we can find comfort in the grace and guidance of a loving God. As the scriptures tell us, ‘Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’”

Read: Ideology kills. How do you police it?

Gun violence is so routine in the United States that becoming numb to reports of the latest tragedy is easy. But in their senseless lethality, there was something especially harrowing about this weekend’s shootings. One mass shooting piled atop another in the space of half a day, reinforcing the creeping sense that no public space is safe. Twenty people died at a Walmart in El Paso, and another nine were murdered outside a bar in a popular neighborhood in Dayton. More than four dozen were injured between the two episodes.

In any other administration, it would fall to the president to reassure a jittery nation. But does the country, at this moment, think Trump has that in him? Does enough of the nation see in him a truly national leader who can bind up fresh wounds? Polling has repeatedly shown that he is the most polarizing president in the modern era. A Gallup survey evaluating Trump’s second year in office found that the gap between Democrats’ and Republicans’ approval of him was a whopping 79 points—the largest ever recorded. His approval rating in 2018, at about 40 percent, was the lowest for any second-year president since World War II, Gallup reported. In a sign of how people view Trump as a moral figure, a Quinnipiac University poll from March showed that by a margin of 72 percent to 21 percent, voters said Trump was not a good role model for children.