A victim of last week’s Florida high school shooting said that she had “never been so unimpressed by a person” as she was when President Donald Trump spoke to her in a phone call to her hospital room.
“He said he heard that I was a big fan of his,” Samantha Fuentes, who was shot in both legs during the Parkland massacre, told the New York Times in an interview published on Thursday. “And then he said, ‘I’m a big fan of yours too.'”
“I’m pretty sure he made that up,” she added.
Fuentes said that she did not feel reassured by Trump’s remarks: “He didn’t make me feel better in the slightest.”
Trump spent the weekend after the shooting at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where he attended a disco-themed party — to wide criticism — though a White House aide told Bloomberg News that Trump planned to skip his usual round of golf “to respect the dead and the mourners.”
On Wednesday, Trump held a listening session with survivors of the shooting. During the event, he held a white notecard with a list of five discussion prompts, including “I hear you.”
Trump’s apparent awkwardness in situations where he was called on to offer condolences to and express solidarity with survivors and grieving families has previously landed him in hot water.
In October 2017, Myeshia Johnson, the widow of a fallen soldier, said that Trump’s call brought her to tears when he told her that her late husband “knew what he signed up for.”