Trump Partied While America Bled, That’s Why He Doesn’t Know If Massacre Was In Dayton Or Toledo

If you missed Donald Trump’s listless monotone performance reading the teleprompter Monday morning, he squandered whatever small measure of goodwill he may have built up with his bombast about taking action against gun violence, by mistakenly consoling the residents of Toledo instead of Dayton, Ohio, where the second massacre of the weekend took place. This is a replay of the same idiotic faux pas he made in California last year, where he spoke of the tragedy of “Pleasure” burning to the ground. The first time he said it, everyone let it go. The second time, a Greek chorus composed of Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsome and others emphatically intoned, “Paradise.” He was standing in the ruins of the mountain community of Paradise, California but he didn’t know it. Nor did he care. He was just going through the motions. Today was no different. Dayton, Toledo, wherever the hell, he just was up there, reading a speech with zero conviction, let alone passion, because he had to. And that’s how it came across.

Trump is a terrible actor, let alone a leader. He has zero empathy, which is egregious, because if you had to name just one quality that a leader must have, empathy would be the one, compassion being second. All of our great leaders, whether in the military or in elected office, have displayed these characteristics. Trump, on the other hand, lacks empathy and compassion to such a pathological degree that he can’t even mimic it. It’s simply not in his makeup. Hence these faux pas, because he’s not really there when he perfunctorily recites from the teleprompter or improvises on his own.

Trump is only fully present when doing what he wants to do, which is perform for the base and get the laughs and the cheers. With respect to the other aspects of statesmanship, that of acting as consoler, counselor, and moral leader, Trump is utterly bereft of anything to give. When he attempts to act like an adult and give a straightforward speech on a sober topic, his characterological deficits of character are painfully evident. The man has no depth or substance. He is an embarrassment, both to himself and to this nation.

Today, he identified social media, video games, mental illness, and last but not least, in a tweet 38 minutes after his speech, “fake news” as being responsible for mass shootings. As to guns? “Mental illness and hatred pulled the trigger, not the gun.” On these facts, do not expect Trump to do anything substantive to enact gun control in this country. He’s just huffing and puffing and making the right noises. As always with Trump, watch what he does, not what he says. And never lose sight of the fact that while the issue of gun control and mass shootings has been with us for a while, in this era, Trump himself is partially responsible for the carnage. Philip Rucker, Washington Post

After yet another mass slaying, the question surrounding the president is no longer whether he will respond as other presidents once did, but whether his words contributed to the carnage.

Since the moment Trump rode down his gold-plated escalator four years ago to start his renegade run for the White House, us-against-them language about immigrants has been a consistent and defining feature of his campaign and now of his presidency. Absent from his repertoire has been a forceful repudiation of the white nationalism taking rise on his watch.

The twin explosions that took place this weekend, on the heels of yet another mass murder at the Gilroy garlic festival in California, did not take place in a vacuum. Donald Trump has been ramping up his attacks in recent weeks, starting with The Squad, moving to Elijah Cummings, and never, ever, letting up on his anti-immigrant rant, in both his rallies in North Carolina and Ohio. Only a complete fool, or a Republican establishment, hellbent on staying in power, would argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric did not foment this violence.

To experts in the field, the El Paso rampage was predictable. Frank Figliuzzi, a former head of counterintelligence at the FBI, wrote in a column published just four days earlier in the New York Times that Trump’s words eventually could incite bloodshed.

“The president has fallen short of calling for overt violence against minorities and immigrants, but unbalanced minds among us may fail to note the distinction,” Figliuzzi wrote. “If a president paints people of color as the enemy, encourages them to be sent back to where they came from and implies that no humans want to live in certain American cities, he gives license to those who feel compelled to eradicate what Mr. Trump calls an infestation.” […]

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified in the Senate last month that the bureau has seen a recent uptick in the number of domestic terrorism arrests and that most involved some form of white supremacy.

Trump has gone on record encouraging immigration from Nordic countries, as opposed to Latin ones. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the El Paso shooter, taking a page from Trump’s book, penned a 2,300 word screed on the “invasion” of America by immigrants, particularly Hispanics, which quotes Donald Trump. We won’t link to the manifesto here, so as not to expand their traffic, but you can go over to 8Chan and read it. Here are some Trump tweets which use the same language as, and perhaps inspired, the manifesto. Click ctrl + to expand them to readability level.

“White Nationalists Praise El Paso Attack and Mock The Dead,” is the title of a piece by Southern Poverty Law Center which describes how Patrick Crusius is the new white nationalist poster child — which was unquestionably his goal in killing and maiming people Saturday. Now, white nationalists are expressing solidarity with him. Crusius’ screed is apparently based in part upon the racist rants of Donald Trump and in part upon the conspiracy theory of the Great Replacement, which states in essence that whites (read Aryan gods) are being targeted for replacement in the world by non-whites (read, inferior mongrels.) That’s the concept. You may recall the chants in Charlottesville, “You will not replace us.” That’s where that came from. Here’s the white supremacists gloating about El Paso — a few days after Donald Trump gloated on Twitter about Congressman Cumming’s home being broken into — starting with Republican Paul Nehlen, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress. Remember him?

Paul Nehlen, who had 90,000 followers on Twitter before the company removed him from the platform, advocates for accelerationism [theory that acts of terrorism will cause collapse of society, paving the way for a new whites-only and non-Jews society] in America.  The former Republican candidate for Congress received praise from Donald Trump when he first ran for office in 2016. Today, Nehlen encourages his Telegram followers to embrace violence against minorities. He refers to himself as “Uncle Paul” and calls white nationalist terror attacks “boogaloos.” Hatewatch reported on Nehlen’s radicalization in a profile of him, which was published in June.

Nehlen responded to news of the attack in El Paso with glee.

“Pew pew pew to the dome,” Nehlen wrote to his Telegram followers, referring to a gory video showing what looks like the body of a person killed in the attack, splayed out on the floor of the Walmart.

Nehlen also reposted the comments of a pseudonymous Telegram user going by the name “Pure Hate.” The user wrote mockingly of the same video, “Clean up in aisle 4!”

“Pure Hate” also appeared to delight in the idea of attacking specifically Hispanic people in separate Telegram posts.

“Hey Bean N——, in case you didn’t hear it the first time. Trump said, ‘you have to go back. You have to go back. We have no choice!’” “Pure Hate” wrote, paraphrasing President Trump’s rhetoric about immigration.

“Thank you Saint Crusius for avenging us,” “Pure Hate” added added underneath pictures of Kate Steinle and Mollie Tibbets.

The two women named were killed allegedly by non-documented immigrants, a factor which not only the white nationalists tout, but which Donald Trump amplifies in his frequent comments about immigrant “rapists” and “murderers.” And he’s not the only one megaphoning these concepts. As a matter of fact, Trump is probably copycatting Fox News.

The El Paso shooter’s screed used phrases taken from Fox News, such as “open borders” “free health care for illegals” and “fake news.” It also said he was killing people to defend America from “cultural and ethnic replacement,” whereas Democrats were conspiring to increase illegal immigration in order to replace whites and seize political power. That’s vintage Fox News dogma. A hat tip to Judd Legum’s Popular Information newsletter (Legum was previously Editor in Chief for ThinkProgress) for the following:

Here is Tucker Carlson talking about it in stark terms in December 2017:

Democrats know if they keep up the flood of illegals into the country, they can eventually turn it into a flood of voters for them…It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s happening in public. You can watch it happen…Their political success does not depend on good policies, but on demographic replacement, and they’ll do anything to make sure it happens.

It wasn’t an isolated comment. Carlson and his guests regularly discuss how immigrants are trying to “replace” whites. Before the 2018 election, host Laura Ingraham urged her viewers to vote Republican or face “a House dominated by Democrats who want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.”

There you have it, in prime time no less. The Democrats want to wipe out white people. And Donald Trump is fully on board for this. Despite his lip service about the shooters being “cowards” bla bla, this is where he really stands.

In addition to provoking racial resentment, Trump has actively dismantled efforts to combat the rising threat of white supremacy. In 2016, the Obama administration created a grant program, the Countering Violent Extremism Grant Program, to counter domestic threats, including white supremacy. One of the grantees, Life after Hate, helps people escape white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations. Another program, run out of the University of North Carolina, supported young people working to prevent their peers from adopting white supremacy. Shortly after he took office, Trump canceled both grants. He later effectively ended the entire program.

That is who we have in office, ladies and gentleman. Do not lose sight of the fact that Donald Trump was on vacation in Bedminster, yet again, when the first shooting tragedy occurred. He did not return to Washington, as a real president would have. He tweeted out some pap about telling the Governor of Texas he would have full federal support and then fifteen minutes later tweeted to Colby Covington, a mixed martial arts fighter, “Fight hard tonight Colby! You are a real champ!” That’s where Trump’s true interest lay, in some sporting event, where his adult sons were in the audience watching Covington, an avid MAGAt. This was Trump’s focus on Saturday morning, not the fact that people were being murdered on American soil.

Then Trump found time to attend a wedding at his golf club, according to images circulating on social media, but even with the second shooting in the wee hours of Sunday, he couldn’t find time to deal with the nation’s misery until Monday morning — and you saw that performance.

Trump is so grotesquely unsuited to any public office, let alone the nation’s highest, that it beggars belief. One way or the other, impeachment, ballot box, both, He.Has.To.Go. We need a real leader back in the Oval Office. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Trump partied while America bled.