Now a hurricane veteran, Trump inspects the damage of another deadly storm

LYNN HAVEN, Fla. – In what has become a recurring fall ritual, President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump came here Monday to witness the destruction of another hurricane, Michael, who devastated the Florida Panhandle last week.

"It's beyond the winds we've seen since – I guess – 50 years," Trump said, before she and Mrs. Trump distribute plastic water bottles to the storm victims in an aid distribution center in this very affected city. "They say that 50 years ago there was one who had that kind of power."

"Fifty years," he added. "It's long."

Even for a president who has already seen five hurricanes – including Harvey, who submerged Houston; Maria, who destroyed Puerto Rico; and Florence, who flooded the Carolinas – Michael has left a particularly spectacular wreck trail along the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Pines were uprooted and exploded – one on a Chevrolet sedan, others by bisecting houses. The roofs had been torn apart, row after row, with blue tarpaulins hanging from the gaping holes. The windows were broken and even the wood cladding was peeled off.

The gas stations were torn apart – their colorful awnings crossed the highways and fell into twisted bursts. In a parking lot, truck trailers were scattered like children's toys.

A water castle was lying on its side, while some roads disappeared completely under a jungle of fallen trees. Beside a demolished warehouse, someone had painted a "live video stream". The intruders shot.

After witnessing so many storms, Mr. Trump began to look like an amateur meteorologist. He pointed out, for example, the slight differences between Florence, which stalled in North Carolina, flooding the state with a record rain, and Michael, who crossed Florida in a few hours, but with violent winds at 155 km / hour.

"Someone said that it was like a very wide and extremely wide tornado," said Trump, alongside Governor Rick Scott of Florida and Brock Long, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who became known personalities on these tours.

"These are massive trees that have just been pulled out of the ground," said Mr. Trump, showing a tangle of uprooted pine trees. "We mostly saw water. And the water can be very damaging and scary when you see the water rising from 14 to 15 feet. But no one has ever seen anything like it. It's really amazing. "

Yet, for someone whose presidency has been interrupted several times by these fantastic storms, Mr. Trump remains stubbornly reluctant to acknowledge the threat of climate change.

The president said the storm surge would not prompt him to rethink his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, reiterating his assertion that the demands of the deal would cripple United States in their economic competition with other countries.

When asked when he thought the climate was changing, he acknowledged that "there is something out there, whether it's man-made or not." . But he claimed that the series of hurricanes did not prove anything in itself. Fifty years ago, he says, there were powerful hurricanes, and particularly monstrous in the 1890s.

Referring to his own experience as an owner in Palm Beach, Florida, where he owns the Mar-a-Lago estate, he said, "We have had years where we had none and then in the past in the last two years we have had more, and I hope we will return to many years where we do not have one. "

Last week, Mr. Trump The United Nations reacted very little to a worrying new report warning of forest fires, food shortages and dying coral reefs by 2040 if the world did not act immediately to stem the tide of rising temperatures.

Earlier, Trump toured the devastation of Marine One, flying over the torn coastline over Panama and Mexico Beach, the most affected of these seaside towns on the Gulf Coast. On the return flight to Panama City, the president's helicopter flew over Tyndall Air Force Base, where several expensive fighter jets were heavily damaged by the winds.