Hurricane Brings a Display of a President Anything but Disengaged

President Trump with his wife, Melania, and son Barron before departing for Camp David on Friday. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump wrapped up a sparkling late-summer weekend at Camp David on Sunday. But his Twitter feed and the photos and statements released by the White House indicated that he did little other than monitor the catastrophic storm in Texas.

On Friday, as Hurricane Harvey began lashing the Gulf Coast, and throughout the weekend, Mr. Trump posted regular updates on the status of the storm and praise for the government’s response. He held two teleconferences with members of his cabinet, announced that he would travel to Texas on Tuesday, and signed a federal disaster proclamation for the state.

It was a calculated display of energetic presidential leadership — one hardly unique to the Trump administration. But it also revealed a president who was genuinely engaged by the drama unfolding in Texas, certainly more so than he has been by other pressing issues facing his administration, like tax reform or a repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

Largely lost in the howling of the storm was the fierce criticism, from Republicans as well as Democrats, of Mr. Trump’s announcement late on Friday night that he had pardoned Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff. The timing seemed anything but coincidental, with cable news channels switching to wall-to-wall coverage as the hurricane approached.

Once he dispensed with that piece of business, Mr. Trump dug in on the storm. But other off-key moments followed. At times, Mr. Trump’s tweets conveyed an unabashed excitement even as a humanitarian crisis overwhelmed Houston and other flooded cities.Wow,” he tweeted on Sunday morning. “Now experts are calling #Harvey a once in 500 year flood! We have an all out effort going, and going well!” An hour earlier, he noted, “Many people are now saying that this is the worst storm/hurricane they have ever seen. Good news is that we have great talent on the ground.”

Mr. Trump did not wait long to start doling out praise. On Saturday, as relief efforts were just gearing up, the president tweeted to the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Brock Long, “You are doing a great job — the world is watching! Be safe.”

That echoed President George W. Bush’s premature endorsement of his FEMA chief, Michael Brown — “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” — after Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans in August 2005. The government’s relief effort, of course, was subsequently botched, and Mr. Bush’s attaboy came back to haunt him.

Hurricane Harvey is the first natural disaster of Mr. Trump’s presidency, and the White House is keenly attuned to the political risks of handling it poorly. When Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, warned Mr. Trump not to repeat the mistakes of Katrina, the president fired back on Twitter, “@Chuck Grassley — got your message loud and clear.”

“We have fantastic people on the ground,” he added, “got there long before #Harvey. So far, so good!”

One thing that may help the Trump administration’s response is the hard-won history that some of its leaders have with Katrina. Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, Thomas P. Bossert, was working for FEMA when the hurricane struck, and later ran Mr. Bush’s emergency preparedness office. The agency’s current administrator, Mr. Long, was head of FEMA’s hurricane program at the time of Katrina.

On Friday, Mr. Bossert said the hurricane was on the minds of everyone in the administration. “That experience is still in their memory,” he told reporters. “It’s still in their experience, their muscle memory. And what we’ve done has gotten a lot better as a government.”

Mr. Bossert suggested that disaster relief, with its focus on rapid response and logistics, was well suited to Mr. Trump.

“This is right up President Trump’s alley,” he said. “His questions weren’t about geopolitical issues or about large political consequences. His questions were about, ‘Are you doing what it takes to help the people who are going to be affected by this storm?’”

On Friday and Saturday, the White House distributed photos of Mr. Trump being briefed on storm preparations and relief efforts.

At Camp David, the president ran the meetings remotely, speaking from a television screen to aides who were in the Situation Room. He was alone at a desk, wearing a jacket but no tie, and a white baseball cap emblazoned with the letters USA.emblazoned with the letters USA.

Administrations typically project an air of activity and resolve during natural disasters. After the calamitous earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the Obama White House issued a stream of fact sheets, statements and Flickr photos to convey the image of a president pulling every lever to help the people there. Mr. Obama dispatched one of his closest aides, Denis R. McDonough, to the capital, Port-au-Prince, to personally oversee the relief effort.

Mr. Obama won credit for that performance. But only four months later, he was faulted for what critics said was his slow-footed response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Mr. Trump’s presidency has been unusual so far in the lack of major external crises, either at home or abroad. Critics have questioned how he would handle a major test, and his response to Hurricane Harvey may offer a blueprint.

His decision to go to Camp David raised some eyebrows, though Mr. Bossert pointed out that the presidential retreat was “45 minutes up the road” from the White House and was equipped with communications facilities that would keep the president in constant contact with his staff.

Given Mr. Trump’s schedule there — and his stream of tweets about it — it is not clear that he would have done much differently if he had stayed in the White House for the weekend. As with his vacation in Bedminster, N.J., the line between work and leisure is often blurry for him.

While the storm clearly dominated the president’s time, he also found time to promote a book by another hard-line law enforcement official, Sheriff David A. Clarke of Milwaukee, take a shot at Missouri’s Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill, repeat a threat to terminate the North American Free Trade Agreement, and reiterate his determination to build a wall on the Mexican border, saying on Twitter that Mexico would pay for it “through reimbursement/other.”