Thoughts and Prayers

 Various Trump-world figures are offering their "thoughts and prayers" this week for the victims of the Texas floods—an empty gesture of ersatz solidarity, which conveniently brushes aside the fact that it was their own DOGE cuts that dismantled the National Weather Service and cut down the nation's various climate-monitoring agencies—not to mention the recent big abominable bill that slashed clean energy measures designed to stop catastrophes just like this one. 

Karoline Leavitt stood up at the White House press conference and declared a "time of national mourning"—while making sure in the same sentence to absolve the administration of any possible blame for the catastrophe. Melania Trump likewise issued a rote statement expressing her condolences to the families affected—sending both "thoughts" and "prayers." Given the way her husband's actions have contributed to the disaster—the clichéd words for many rang hollow. 

Oh, Melania. She has never inhabited comfortably the gender-stereotyped role of national empathizer in which American First Ladies are so often cast. The most notorious example remains her visit to the child detention center during her husband's first term—when she chose as a fashion statement on that day (of all days) to sport a coat with the slogan: "I really don't care—do you?" The message can hardly have been unintentional. One tastes a similar tang of patronizing hypocrisy here. 

One is reminded on all such occasions—when she is called in to shed crocodile tears and express empty "care" for the victims of her own husband's policies (never to actually change those policies, of course, but always to extend hollow sympathy for the needless suffering they cause, and which Trump could so easily prevent—often by simply not acting at all)—of Hugh MacDiarmid's poem "In the children's hospital"— about a Princess who pays a condescending visit to the maimed poor: 

Now let the legless boy show the great lady

How well he can manage his crutches.

It doesn't matter though the Sister objects,

'He's not used to them yet', when such is

The will of the Princess [...]

For a couple of legs are surely no miss

When the loss leads to such an honour as this! [...]

But would the sound of your sticks on the floor

Thundered in her skull for evermore!