No reprieve from political conflicts
AMID U.S. BOMBS SCARE, CALL FOR UNITY SHELVED FOR POLITICAL BARBS
It didn’t last. With the country on edge over a widening pipe-bomb scare, talk of national unity quickly gave way to finger-pointing Thursday. President Donald Trump cast blame on the media for fomenting anger in society, while candidates across the country traded partisan broadsides.
Less than two weeks before midterm elections, the discovery of pipe bombs sent to prominent Democrats — an episode that might have prompted national reflection in another era — hardly made a ripple on the campaign trail. Attack ads remained on the air. Attack lines stayed in stump speeches. The president did not deliver a speech from the Oval Office or reach out to his predecessor, one of the targets of the threat. He did return to his favourite punching bag.
“A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!”
The reaction was more evidence of the new politics of the Trump era, where unity is overrated, a news cycle moves on fast and there seems to be little incentive for either party to seize the high road. Instead, what might have been a moment for a deeply divided country to come together becomes the latest fodder for Democrats and Republicans to blame each other for America’s shortcomings.
Aides at the national Democratic and Republican Senate campaign arms said they were seeing nothing to suggest candidates were adjusting their messages or schedules because of the explosives scare. But many candidates were beginning to move into their closing election messages, which are typically more positive.
Some Trump critics have blamed him for setting a harsh tone and not taking responsibility for contributing to the poisonous political atmosphere.
“Nobody else is being as divisive and inciteful as Donald Trump and so to suggest otherwise is completely wrong,” said former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, who is considering a 2020 Democratic presidential campaign. “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation with any other president, Republican or Democrat, because they would be big enough to avoid this kind of hateful and inciteful rhetoric.”
Trump on Thursday had yet to call Obama or Clinton about the packages sent their way, but he had spoken to Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, the state where many of the packages were delivered.