NEW YORKERS SAY ‘WE
Not too soon for prez to politicize this tragedy
Exactly one month ago, Stephen Paddock smashed out the windows of his Las Vegas suite and opened fire on a crowd of country music fans with an arsenal of modified machine guns he bought legally.
He killed 58 people and wounded 546 more in what became the worst mass shooting in American history.
Two days after the carnage, President Trump went to Las Vegas to visit with survivors of this act of “domestic terrorism.” When asked if the bloodshed might prompt a review of America’s gun obsession, Trump snapped back: “We’re not talking about that now.”
And he hasn’t talked about it since.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders stiff-armed the press with lines like: “This is a day for consoling survivors and mourning those we lost. There is a time and place for a political debate, but we certainly don’t want to politicize this tragedy.”
No, we certainly don’t want to do that. Or do we?
Yesterday, less than 24 hours after Sayfullo Saipov used a rented pickup truck to run down and kill eight people on a Manhattan bike path, Trump was politicizing like crazy.
In a 7:24 am tweet, he ranted: “This terrorist came into this country through what is called the Diversity Lottery Program. A Chuck Schumer beauty.” Wrong.
This particular program is some two decades old and was a bipartisan product ushered into existence by Ted Kennedy.
“Sen. Chuck Schumer helped to import Europe’s problems,” Trump continued to rail.
Schumer took to the Senate floor yesterday morning to call out Trump and his naked hypocrisy.
“I guess it’s not too soon,” Schumer said, “to politicize a tragedy.”
A month ago, Donald Trump went mute when asked if he thought the Las Vegas massacre was an act of “domestic terrorism.” Of Stephen Paddock, the white 64-year-old millionaire who lugged three dozen rifles up to his suite, he said, “The wires were crossed pretty badly in his brain, extremely badly in his brain. And it’s a very sad event. He was a sick demented person.”
Yesterday, Trump blasted Sayfullo Saipov as “an animal” that he promised to quickly ship off to Gitmo.
What constitutes terrorism for Donald Trump depends, like everything else, on what plays to his base. Stephen Paddock slaughtered 58 and maimed hundreds more, but he was gun lover who could have passed for another Trumpian in a red hat.
No matter how ghastly the Las Vegas massacre was, Donald Trump was never going to antagonize the NRA by pointing out the insanity of a true domestic terrorist who purchased four dozen automatic rifles in the last year of his life.
Yesterday, it was so much easier for the president to blow a gasket over that other terrorist, the lone wolf from Uzbekistan who worked for Uber and drove into infamy with toy guns and a pickup truck from Home Depot.