The visits were supposed to be about the victims. When Donald Trump traveled to Dayton and El Paso yesterday, the White House said no photo opps. The press was kept away.

That was yesterday. Today, the White House has released videos of the visit, complete with a music score, smiling faces and lots of Trump. From the Washington Post:

“Curious about how much of the video featured Trump, we walked through it, frame-by-frame. The video was about 50 seconds long in total. Trump is visible for about 37 seconds of that, or nearly three-quarters of the entire video. That includes only shots in which Trump’s head is visible — meaning that it doesn’t include several shots of him shaking hands.“

The tweet pinned to the president's Twitter page includes a video in which he's visible for 20 of 27 seconds and which is mostly people trying to get or taking pictures with him.

The only audio is music; later video shows him talking crowd size. https://t.co/mir5nCaFet pic.twitter.com/BMr0HduJbo

— Philip Bump (@pbump) August 8, 2019

There are three other campaign videos from the day. They are ads for Donald Trump. If you’re interested, you can find them. We chose not to post them. Trump has turned tragedy into politics and made devastating attacks on two cities all about his popularity.

Here’s another irony as Trump tries to paint positive coverage for himself.

The White House released its own footage of the visit, but TV networks have a long-standing policy of not using White House hand-out video if there was no independent TV presence there. Since the TV pool was excluded from the visit, none of the White House video was used. https://t.co/xrKzFjhRTV

— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) August 8, 2019

The post contains analysis and opinion.