WASHINGTON — President Trump landed in storm-brushed Corpus Christi on Tuesday morning to see for himself some of the damage caused by Tropical Storm Harvey and demonstrate his personal commitment to a region still in the grips of a historic natural disaster.
Mr. Trump, who pushed aides to schedule a visit to Texas as early as possible after Harvey made landfall near Rockport, Texas, on Friday night as a Category 4 hurricane, initially considered touring San Antonio, which is outside the most hard-hit areas. But he settled on Corpus Christi because it was 30 miles away from the most severely impacted parts of the Gulf Coast, and suffered relatively light damage from the initial impact of the storm.
“It’s a real team, and we want to do it better than ever before,” Mr. Trump said of the response effort during a meeting with officials from local, state and federal agencies in a Corpus Christi firehouse. “We want to be looked at in five years, in 10 years from now as, this is the way to do it.”
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, sitting next to the president, sought to allay concerns about the situation at the convention center in downtown Houston, where 9,000 residents fleeing rising floodwaters have crammed into a makeshift shelter designed to accommodate 5,000.
“This is not the Superdome,” Brock Long, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said, referring to the nightmarish conditions residents of New Orleans endured while seeking shelter at a sports arena after Hurricane Katrina 12 years ago.
“At the convention center, we are sustaining food,” added Mr. Long, who sat near the state’s junior senator, Ted Cruz, who was briefly trapped by flooding in Houston on Monday.
Graphic | Maps: Tracking Harvey’s Destructive Path Through Texas and Louisiana Maps and animated satellite imagery show the scale and reach of the storm.
The people at the convention center, have food and security, Mr. Long said.
“I have an incident management team inside the city of Houston,” he said. “And more and more people are being moved to shelters to stabilize the situation.”
“All eyes are on Houston, and so are mine,” added Mr. Long.
After conferring with emergency management officials, the president, accompanied by Melania Trump, the first lady, boarded Air Force One to travel north to Austin, to meet with other officials.
As he exited the firehouse, Mr. Trump noticed a crowd of about 1,000 people, some of them cheering. He grabbed a lone star Texas flag and shouted back to the crowd, seeming to forget, for the moment, that he was at the scene of a disaster and not one of his rallies. “What a crowd!” he said. “What a turnout!”
In the state capital, the president is also scheduled to meet with several members of Congress, and local elected officials and mayors. He has no plans to meet the mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner.
“Due to the weather and all of the circumstances it’s a little bit more fluid today than a normal travel day,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters aboard Air Force One during a turbulent flight.
“The president wants to be very cautious about making sure that any activity doesn’t disrupt any of the recovery efforts that are still ongoing, which is the reason for the locations we are going here today,” she said. “As of right now, I don’t know that we will be able to get to some of the really damaged areas.”
Mr. Trump, his aides say, is eager to avoid the mistakes made by President George W. Bush in 2005, when he took a relatively hands-off approach to the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
Vice President Mike Pence and federal officials from the Department of Homeland Security have taken the lead on negotiating many of the details of the response, but Mr. Trump has taken pains to emphasize his involvement in the crisis.
“We are glad he’s coming,” said Ben Molina, a Corpus Christi councilman. “It’s important that he sees the damage around the coast. I’ve never seen anything like it, and neither has anybody else.”
The president on Monday pledged to quickly pass an appropriations bill to deal with the massive damage to private property and public infrastructure. He said he would return to region this weekend.
Mr. Trump left Washington on a rainy morning, boarding Air Force One with an entourage of aides that included John F. Kelly, his chief of staff; Marc Short, his legislative affairs director and his point man with elected officials in the region; and specialists from the Small Business Administration, who will assist local businesses with recovery loans.
Mrs. Trump boarded wearing a green jacket, slacks and stilettos — attire which was widely noted on social media. She emerged from the plane in Corpus Christi wearing a white jacket, a baseball cap emblazoned with “FLOTUS” and white tennis shoes. Mr. Trump did not change clothes en route. He wore leather boots, khakis and a white collared shirt with a windbreaker bearing a presidential seal; his white baseball cap read “USA.”
An earlier version of this article misattributed a series of quotations. The person describing the situation for evacuees at the convention center in Houston was Brock Long, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas.
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