An air tragedy in the night. All were lost.  The shockwaves rolled out from the Potomac to Kansas to Boston and even to Russia. Brilliant young skaters and their families and entourage, people going home, people living life. A fiery crash and suddenly life flips upside down. Now the press conferences and investigations, the courageous first responders, anguished families. 

President Trump began his press conference in an expected way, with a moment of silence, then plunged into a weird and irrelevant riff of unfounded speculation, blaming and untruths. 

Abraham Maslow wrote in 1966, “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Blame is a first reflex for the President, it seems. A historian friend said to me last year that Mr. Trump has one single ingenious talent. He can identify grievance and bundle it together. 

He is not able to bring people together with this tool. And therefore he will never be able to enlarge his fanatical following to bring others into the fold with him. He is the bully in the schoolyard, and cannot ever lay it down for a human moment.  Self-transcendence, introspection and comfort might as well be the Mandarin alphabet. 

We should be mourning together. Instead the press conference did what every awful visitor at a funeral visitation does to a grieving family—talking about DEI, air traffic controllers, the previous administration, theories without a nit of evidence. Everything except the elephant in the room. People, beloved people died, untimely, tragic, gone in a moment. 

The President isn’t the first person I’ve seen who can’t cope with grief and loss. I seen plenty of people in fifty years since I went into the ministry who couldn’t handle it. They rage through it and wreck themselves and their families, or turn to stone and can’t get back to life for a long time. Still others sink into long, quiet desperation. But the worst is not being able to simply face the fact that tragedies are part of life and sometimes there’s nothing to blame. You grieve. That’s it. And a minute of silence doesn’t serve as an opening prayer for something else.

As he rambled on, more than anything, I saw  a man squirming in his own humanity, not wanting to be here, emotionally incapable of what the moment requires.

He is the President, for better or worse. But he’s pretty much a guy with one tool. When you need a hammer, well, that’s just fine. But we’re not on the campaign trail anymore, just the daily parade of crises coming at us day after day. And you have to stand there, watching him alone with a hammer in his hand and the funeral about to start. He looks lost, and that hammer feels out of place, bizarre, even, while we’re stumbling together into the twilight.