What a tragedy built on a layer cake of tragedies, what a goddamn human shame, that Donald Trump is our president during the worst wave of school shootings the world has ever seen. This verily guarantees there will be many more shootings, perfectly avoidable massacres like the one last week in Santa Fe, Texas, because the president will do nothing meaningful to prevent them. Instead, we are doomed to let him play-act the role of Fixer in Chief for a crisis he has no intention of fixing, and most galling of all, watch him pretend to serve as Consoler in Chief for a pain that has become inconsolable.

We’ve been through enough of these scenarios under Trump to know exactly how he will respond to a fresh tragedy. It begins with a quick and dutiful tweet. (Of all the forms of Trump tweetage, none is more content-free, and none feels less true to his personality, than the ones that come after high school shootings.) “God bless all!” he exclaimed as news of Santa Fe spread. This is soon followed, tele-visually, by a Sober Public Comment to demonstrate that he is taking it all so very seriously. And then comes the firm and empty promise to “keep students safe.”

“Very sad day. Very very sad,” he declared this time. The words trickle out mournfully, like a sympathy shush. “Sadness and heartbreak.....closely monitoring...” There, there.

That’s the thing that's kept running through my head since Parkland. I don't mean the sheer terror of that day or the realization that since Columbine, mass shootings in high schools have become literally as normalized as fire drills. I don't mean the steeliness of those student protesters who, in the weeks after, did what adult politicians were too milk-livered to do: forced us all to go to our rooms and talk about gun control. And I don't mean the inanity of President Trump—a barely concealed weapon of the NRA himself—calling for a militia of well-armed teachers.

No, I'm talking about the president's strange and stilted “grief speech” to the nation the day after the shooting, the hollowed-out way he spoke and tried to soothe us. It was…spooky. It did not work.

There's been a lot gushingly said about the role of Comforter in Chief, and perhaps too much pressure placed upon it—how the hugging, mugging manner of Bill Clinton set the gold standard for national grief-easing. George W. seemed to struggle with that part of the job, feeling more comfortable with backslaps and bullhorns than hugs and homilies. Obama was a natural. But I don't think we understood just how bad Trump is at it, or how sorely we miss the skill set, until now.

If Clinton's emotive principle was “I feel your pain,” Trump's so far has been “I cannot feel your pain, I'm not really interested in your pain, but remember this: Only I can cure pain.”

On this day, however, Trump, perhaps sensing a change in the emotional weather, was trying something new. Empathy. But it was empathy with a mission, to sling a little compassion around so as to quickly change the subject, and that's why it failed so miserably.

You'll remember the speech. The hushed Mister-Rogers-reads-from-a-teleprompter way he addressed victims and other traumatized kids. “I want to speak now directly to America's children, especially those who feel lost, alone, confused, [pause] or even scared”—and here his eyebrows did a weird pop-up thing, as if he were channeling the fears of a toddler or reading from an illustrated storybook. Soon we were in the land of make-believe: “I want you to know that you are never alone and you never will be.” Okay, if you say so, but what should we do about guns and scary people in our schools? “If you need help,” he telepromptered, “turn to a teacher, a family member, a local police officer, or a faith leader. Answer hate with love.”