Donald Trump has come under heavy fire (figuratively, of course) over the past 48 hours for the extent to which his anti-immigrant rhetoric and generalized vitriol have served to divide the country and stoke racial tensions.
The shooter who gunned down 20 people in El Paso, Texas, over the weekend posted a white nationalist screed online prior to committing one of the most heinous acts of domestic terrorism in US history. Hours later, a gunman killed nine (including his sister) in Dayton, Ohio.
If you haven’t read the El Paso gunman’s manifesto, we don’t recommend it. But if you have, you know it echoes (in some cases almost verbatim) Trump’s tweets and rally rhetoric. That is a fact.
Read more on the disturbing trend in mass killings since WWII
At the end of the multi-page rant, the Texas shooter claims his views “predate” Trump, an apparent effort to deflect blame from the president. He even uses the phrase “fake news”. But that’s likely to fall on deaf ears considering the language in the rest of the document, which contains at least one reference to “send them back”.
Trump on Monday addressed the nation from the White House and it was a laborious, painful affair, complete with the characteristic sniffling, heavy breathing and bouts of acute dry mouth that have plagued the president during similar on-script speeches in the past (e.g., the Jerusalem announcement).
It is impossible to overstate how insulting it is to a grieving nation’s intelligence to hear this president say things like:
The shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto online consumed by racist hate. In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy.
The fact is, his voice is the one that should be the loudest and count for the most, but instead, Trump has spent four straight years making what can at best be described as “controversial” statements about race and immigration. At worst, the president’s rhetoric is racist and has, whether he knows it or not, radicalized some impressionable Americans.
Here is Trump attempting to make it through his speech:
(If the video does not load, please refresh your page)
The president went on to call on both parties to “find the courage to answer hatred with unity and love”, a statement so absurd coming from Trump that even the president’s defenders will likely find it difficult to reconcile with the message he pushes on every other day of the week.
“We will always have and we always will win”, Trump stammered, before declaring that “it is not up to mentally ill monsters” to decide whether the country succeeds or fails. (The cynical among you might argue that it is, in fact, up to a “mentally ill monster”, namely the one giving the speech.)
The president then took the irony up another ten or so notches. “[We will work with] social media companies to develop tools to identify mass shooters before they strike”, he said. A nice sentiment, but Trump is arguably the king of spreading vitriol on social media. (Do note, again, how hard of a time Trump had reading from the teleprompter.)
In the final insult, Trump closed his address by saying “May God bless the memory of those who perished in Toledo”.
The Ohio shooting happened in Dayton.
Nothing further.
pathetic.
It shows just how little he cares.
What’s even worse, his supporters will either
a) ignore it or
b) (the really crazy ones) spin some Q-inspired conspiracy theory about Toledo being the place of the “great awakening” or whatever.
Sociopaths are incapable of empathy.
When someone doesn’t care, it shows.
In it, Ron Reagan describes his growing sense of alarm over his father’s mental condition, beginning as early as three years into his first term. He recalls the presidential debate with Walter Mondale on 7 October 1984.
“My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with his notes, uncharacteristically lost for words. He looked tired and bewildered,” Ron Reagan writes.
Against that is the word of Michael Reagan, who was adopted by the president and his first wife, Jane Wyman. His book The New Reagan Revolution, is an appeal for a return to his father’s political principles of low taxes and small government as a way to making America great again.
Their father’s mannerisms while in office — including stumbling over his words, his occasional falling asleep in public, his weak memory — led to much speculation about how early on dementia had set in. The New York Times medical writer Larry Altman even raised the question with Reagan during an interview in 1980 just before he entered the White House. Reagan said he would quit if he developed Alzheimer’s while in office.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/17/ronald-reagan-alzheimers-president-son
What an arrant sociopathic scumbag.
Clearly this mentally incompetent (but brilliant genetic-level predatory) grifter is bereft of any vestige of empathy; any access to the spectrum of he most basic human compassion and – worse – cognizance of its actual meaning or feeling. He’s a monstrously megalomaniacal brutish parasite and his perfidy is second only to his mirror-whoring self deification.
The inclination to indict his utter absence of even a hardened criminal’s understanding of social interactions as the main problem is naive – and terrifying in the implication: beyond an implacable panoply of recreant existential menace and meta rape, he’s fundamentally stupid.
What a fucking menace in virtually every way. He’s a DSM5-infested; just this side of intellectual retardation; implacably (and perhaps literally) solipsistic; and disgustingly, is representative of the large minority of trumpFilth savagery that still skulks hatefully about America’s modern iterations.
What a scumbag – he metaphorically, verbally, politically, and psycho emotionally shit all over those wretchedly bereaved victims and our Nation.
Come on now, tell us how you really feel about 45…