Donald Trump seemed to have something else on his mind when a reporter asked him how he was “holding up” after the shooting death of his friend Charlie Kirk.
The president was asked about how his “last three and a half days” have been on a personal level in the aftermath of Kirk’s death, as the conservative activist had been close to the Trump family. Trump replied that he was holding up, “I think very good,” but seemed to prefer to discuss the construction of his new White House ballroom instead.
“And by the way,” Trump said Thursday as he left the White House, “right there, you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. And it’s going to be a beauty. It’ll be absolutely magnificent structure.”
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“It’ll get done very nice and it’ll be one of the best anywhere in the world,” he added, and then walked off without an additional word about the shocking death.
The stark pivot caught the attention of Pod Save America co-hosts Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor. “I have no words,” Vietor said on their show Friday after rolling the clip.
Pfeiffer added, “It’s truly just the lack of empathy, sympathy, just general human emotion in the man is like gobsmacking.”
Kirk, 31, was killed by a gunshot during a Wednesday afternoon appearance at the University of Utah. Trump vowed to crack down on “rhetoric” from “the radical left,” which he said was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today,” though authorities have yet to confirm the motive behind Kirk’s death.
The Pod Save America hosts acknowledged that even though Trump will be posthumously awarding Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States and reportedly called Kirk’s widow in the aftermath—the “pivot” in response to Friday’s question was “just so weird.”
“To pivot a question like that to wanting credit about constructing a ballroom—did you not hear that in your own head, how wrong that sounds?” Vietor said. “He can’t find even a second to just have some empathy.”
