Trump sets forth spirit of presidential response to tragedy
Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster. Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing. George W. Bush after the terror attacks in Washington and New York. Barack Obama after the church shootings in Charleston.
And now this. Donald Trump after Las Vegas.
In some ways — not in the American Constitution, but surely in the American tradition — the president is the nation’s First Responder.
And almost all of them, even those known for being divisive, are prompted by these occasions to speak to American unity — as Trump did when he said, in his formal remarks in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, that Americans’ “unity cannot be shattered by evil, our bonds cannot be broken by violence.”
These are sober moments of condolence and compassion, the sort that chief executives neither expect nor are prepared for, the kind that call upon presidential presence. For Trump — whose responses to the confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia, and even the London Bridge attack, stirred rather than cooled passions — this was an important challenge, especially so for a president who has stretched the boundaries of presidential comportment and yet has struggled to appear presidential.
And amid the flash of news reports and the reckoning of body counts growing out of the worst mass shooting in the country’s history, Trump — still under criticism for his response to the Puerto Rico hurricane disaster and for his attacks on the mayor of San Juan — responded to both the news and the moment.
For his critics — who have assailed him in the past several days for stoking controversy over the national anthem at NFL games, for undercutting his own secretary of state over North Korean negotiations and for producing a tax overhaul that would favor business and the wealthy — there was little to criticize, although advocates of gun control surely wish he had used this occasion to embrace their cause.
He produced a spare statement, expressing the nation’s grief, and pledged to visit the scene. Simple, perhaps, but significant in Trump’s presidential passage, which so often has been marked by excess — his own, and his critics’.
There is no playbook for a presidential response to tragedy, and yet, whether inadvertently, instinctively or intentionally, Trump hit many of the appropriate touchstones.
Like Bush after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Trump employed the word “evil” to describe the acts that brought horror to America’s door.
Like Obama after the Charleston church shootings, Trump sought to find consolation in calamity.
Like Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombings, the president leaned on Scripture. The remarks from Trump — like Reagan, not ordinarily known for spiritual introspection — were in his own words: “Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. We seek comfort in those words, for we know that God lives in the hearts of those who grieve.”
In perhaps the greatest American speech ever, Abraham Lincoln expressed wonder and mystery at the tragedy of the Civil War. “The Almighty has His own purposes,” Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, in 1865, a month before the war would end and he would be assassinated, before quoting the Book of Matthew: “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.”
Unlike the famous passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald — “There are no second acts in American life” — American presidents do get second acts.
The second act for Trump comes with his twin visits, first to Puerto Rico and then to Las Vegas. The passage from Fitzgerald comes from “The Last Tycoon” — an unfinished novel.