Donald and Melania Trump meet Hurricane Harvey victims in Houston

FP Staff • September 3, 2017, 15:45:09 IST

An upbeat and optimistic president visited with victims of Harvey on Saturday, touring a Houston mega-shelter housing hundreds of displaced people and briefly walking streets lined with soggy, discarded possessions.

President Donald Trump met people impacted by Hurricane Harvey during a visit to the NRG Center in Houston on Saturday. Hurricane Harvey marked the first major natural disaster of Trump’s eight months in office. AP

“As tough as this was, it’s been a wonderful thing,” Trump said of the Harvey response after spending time with displaced children inside the NRG Centre. AP

The American president also briefly walked streets lined with soggy, discarded possessions. Reuters

Trump met the scene with positivity, congratulating officials on an emergency response still in progress and telling reporters that he’d seen “a lot of love” and “a lot of happiness” in the devastation the storm left behind. Reuters

First lady Melania Trump helps a volunteer hand out meals at the NRG relief centre. The Trumps brought coloring books and crayons and sat with families that had been displaced. Reuters

“I want to congratulate everybody who has worked so hard. It’s been an incredible five days, six days. It seems like it’s been much longer than that, but actually it’s going so well that it’s going fast, in a certain sense,” Trump said as he then visited the Houston suburb of Pearland. Reuters