Donald Trump has toured a Tennessee neighbourhood reduced to rubble by a tornado earlier this week and marvelled at “the tremendous heart” he witnessed.
He also offered a message for survivors and those who lost family members. “We love them, they’re special people,” he said.
Mr Trump surveyed devastated communities in Putnam County, where a tornado tore a two-mile path, killing 18 people, including five children under 13. Many more people were injured, some critically.
Statewide, the death toll stood at 24 from a pair of storms.
“It’s been a painful, tragic week for our state,” Mr Lee said after surveying with Mr Trump a street where eight people were killed.
The street was filled with debris where houses once stood. Limbs were crudely snapped from trees. A white laundry basket, chairs from a dining table and a step ladder dotted the landscape.
Mr Trump then met survivors and volunteers at a local church filled with boxes of emergency supplies, pallets of water and tables filled with clothes.
He posed for pictures and shook hands with people before speaking to emergency personnel. “Nobody’s seen what you had to go through,” Mr Trump said.
Such trips have become familiar for the president, who has visited numerous scenes of disaster and tragedy after hurricanes, mass shootings and wildfires during the past three years.
The Republican president won Tennessee by 26 percentage points in the 2016 election, and trounced Democrat Hillary Clinton in Putnam County by a margin of more than two to one.
Davidson County, the other Tennessee region devastated by tornadoes, is a Democratic enclave in the reliably Republican red state.
Mr Trump was ending the day at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, attending a pair of fundraising events to benefit the Republican Party and his re-election campaign.
