Trump’s rhetoric fueled by denials

Connor Betts, the alleged Dayton, Ohio, shooter, had leftwing political views, believed in socialism, supported Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, and regularly inveighed on Twitter against various personages on the right (including, it turns out, me). This has some conservatives fuming that liberal media is conveniently ignoring the progressive ideology of one shooter while obsessing over the far-right ideology of another — Patrick Crusius, who posted an antiimmigrant manifesto shortly before police say he murdered 22 people in El Paso, Texas.

Sorry, but the comparison doesn’t wash. It’s idiotic.

The Dayton victims did not fit any political or ethnic profile: They were black and white, male and female, an immigrant from Eritrea and Betts’ own sister. Crusius’ victims, overwhelmingly Hispanic, did: They were the objects of his expressly stated political rage.

What happened in Ohio was a mass shooting in the mold of the Las Vegas massacre: victims at random, motives unknown. What happened in Texas was racist terrorism in the mold of Oslo, Charleston, Pittsburgh, Christchurch and Poway.

The former attack vaguely implicates the “dark psychic force” that Marianne Williamson spoke of in last week’s Democratic debates. The latter directly implicates the immigrant-bashing xenophobic right led by Donald Trump.

This needs to be said not because it isn’t obvious, but because too many conservatives have tried to deny the obvious. It’s not about ideology, they say: It’s a mental health issue. But that’s precisely the kind of evasive reasoning many of those conservatives mocked in 2016, when the mental state and sexual orientation of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen was raised by some media voices to suggest that his attack had not really been an act of Islamist terrorism.

Alternatively, conservatives have cited the decline of civil society, the effects of the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, the paucity of prayer and the ubiquity of violent video games as explanations for mass shootings.

Get real: The right’s attempt to downplay the specifically ideological context of the El Paso massacre is a transparently self-serving attempt to absolve the president of moral responsibility for his demagogic rhetoric. This, too, shouldn’t wash. The president is guilty, in a broad sense, of a form of incitement.

No, Trump did not specifically incite anyone to violence. His scripted condemnation Monday of white supremacy was, at least, a condemnation.

But incitement takes many forms. In June 2018, Trump tweeted the following: “Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!”

The tweet is significant precisely because it is almost forgotten. And yet it’s all there: The imputation of bad faith to his political opponents.

And the language of infestation. In today’s America, the dissemination of the idea, via the bully pulpit of the presidency, that we are not merely being strained or challenged by immigrants in the country illegally, but invaded and infested, predicated the slaughter in El Paso.

The language of infestation inevitably suggests the “solution” of extermination. As for the cliché that sensible people are supposed to take Trump seriously but not literally, it looks like Patrick Crusius didn’t get that memo.