There’s an old saying in politics: Never let a crisis go to waste.
It looks like former US president Donald Trump heeded that advice during Wednesday’s visit to disaster-stricken East Palestine, Ohio, site of a 50-car derailment earlier this month.
Trump made the visit even though he no longer has the ability to declare the town a disaster area ― or any of the other things a president can do in the event of a tragedy.
But what he does have is chutzpah and, apparently, a whole bunch of bottles of Trump water lying around.
So the former president brought the water, which was labelled Trump Spring Water, to East Palestine, along with some other bottled water he said was of “a much lesser quality”.
Although some Twitter users speculated the bottles were actually Trump Ice, a designer water brand discontinued in 2010, the bottles were labelled Trump Spring Water, a brand available at various Trump properties.
The Independent noted that it couldn’t immediately verify what percentage of the bottles donated by Trump were branded with his name.
The water bottles and the desperate need to make himself the centre of attention amid a tragic situation reminded some people of the time in October 2017 when Trump tossed rolls of paper towels to Puerto Ricans whose lives had been devastated by Hurricane Maria.
Other Twitter users had strong reactions over Trump’s visit to the town, whose residents have been left guessing about the quality of their municipal water supply after vinyl chloride and other chemicals were released in the derailment and scepticism remains about declarations the water is safe to drink.
Some people speculated about how old the water might be.
Others made jokes about the possible colour.
However, one Twitter user took advantage of Trump’s visit to post an Access Hollywood clip from 2010 where Sylvester Stallone tries Trump Water in a blind taste test and says he wouldn’t wash his socks in it.
The former president may be attempting to politicise the disaster, but his legacy of gutting rail safety rules make any advice he might suggest regarding the Ohio disaster ironic, according to Sarah Feinberg, head of the Federal Railroad Administration in the final years of Barack Obama’s administration.
“The Trump administration rolled back and killed some regulations we had been working on; in many cases, they just stopped working on regulations altogether,” Feinberg told HuffPost. “The impression that the safety apparatus got was that what industry wanted, industry got.”