NATURAL DISASTERS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump offered words of comfort on Friday [3-8-19] for Alabama’s tornado survivors, scrawling his presidential signature on some of their Bibles as they moved close to him at a church that provided shelter during the storm and was now doling out emergency aid. ‘We saw things you wouldn’t believe,’ Mr. Trump said as he stood amid the wreckage and rubble of Beauregard, the site of the nation’s deadliest tornado in six years. Mr. Trump’s travels through Alabama — in a helicopter for an aerial tour, through a debris-strewn neighborhood and later at the Baptist church that has been a hub of relief efforts — were a welcome presence in Beauregard, where at least one of the storm’s victims had flown a Trump campaign flag outside his home and where Mr. Trump captured most of the vote. A few hundred people lined the two-lane county road by Providence Baptist Church to try to glimpse Mr. Trump from the grassy shoulder or the nearby cemetery.”
–Alan Blinder and Elizabeth Dias, “Trump Surveys Tornado Damage in Alabama, and Signs Some Bibles, Too,” The New York Times online, March 8, 2019