Trump's Louisiana Visit: Us Versus Them, Over And Over Again
You may have concluded from various news reports that Donald Trump did nothing in the Louisiana flood zone yesterday except hand out Play-Doh, but that's not accurate -- Matthew Teague of The Guardian notesthat in St. Amant, Louisiana, Trump handed out diapers and water bottles. So Trump's Louisiana trip was a self-serving photo op, but not a completely ridiculous one.
However, if one of the locals quoted by Teague is any indication, you wonder why we're even talking about Trump, President Obama, and Hillary Clinton in connection to this disaster at all -- at least some of these people would have you believe that they don't need any damn handouts, from the government, an alleged billionaire, or anyone else:
“This is [Trump's] stomping grounds,” said Greg Patterson, who was cleaning muck from his store called the Pit Stop. The idea that a billionaire from Manhattan could describe the working-class corner of Louisiana as “his stomping grounds” did not strike Patterson as contradictory.
“We’ve got 2,000 houses damaged just in this area alone,” he said, stretching his arm out to the south. “These people are already back in their homes, working to repair them. It’s not like down in the Ninth Ward.”