Trump’s pile of rubble
The president could take action on gun violence but has yet to find the courage
One of the most totemic pictures of the Obama era was a White House photo showing the president bowing to let a 5- year- old black boy touch his hair.
As Jackie Calmes reported in The New York Times, the boy, the son of a departing National Security Council staffer, had shyly told Barack Obama, “I want to know if my hair is just like yours.”
“Touch it, dude!” the president instructed the child.
It was a moment that summed up all the giddy dreams about race and modernity and a gleaming American future that propelled a freshman senator with an exotic name into office.
Now, one of the most totemic pictures of the Trump era has been tweeted by first lady Melania Trump from the El Paso hospital visited by the first couple amid the blood- dimmed tide of back- to- back gun massacres in Texas and Dayton.
The first lady is holding 2month- old Paul Anchondo, whose parents, Jordan and Andre, died shielding him from a shooter who confessed to the police that he drove from his home in Allen, Texas, to El Paso to kill Mexicans with an AK- 47- style rifle. A manifesto he posted on 8chan, an online forum that’s a haven for white nationalists, stated that he wanted to stop the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
President Donald Trump, standing next to Melania and the baby in the picture, is grinning and giving a thumbs- up.
The infant’s uncle, Tito Anchondo, told reporters that he brought Paul to the hospital to
meet Mr. Trump, while other victims refused to do so, because he wanted to tell the president about the pain of the family. His slain brother, he said, was a Trump supporter. He told The Washington Post that he felt consoled by Mr. Trump.
But still, there is something sickening about the photo. The picture of Mr. Obama with a child was luminous with hope and idealism. The one of Mr. Trump with a child was dark with pain and shattered ideals.
Devoid of empathy and humanity, Mr. Trump is mugging with an infant who will never know his parents. They were shot by a psychopath whose views echoed Mr. Trump’s dangerous and vile rants painting people with darker skin — like the baby’s father — as the enemy, an infestation and invasion aiming to take something away from real Americans. It is the same slimy chum thrown out by other Republicans, only more brutally direct and not limited to campaign season.
Even as we absorbed the grotesque image from the hospital, we had to watch the heart- rending footage of Hispanic children sobbing and stranded in Mississippi because their parents, many working at a chicken processing plant, had been rounded up by ICE.
The shining city on a hill is an ugly pile of rubble.
Even on this most tragic of weeks for so many families, Mr. Trump was obsessing on himself, on his crowd size compared with Beto, and on whether he was getting enough obeisance from Ohio pols.
It defies one’s faith in the good sense and decency of America that we cannot stop the deluge of shooting rampages — even at a time of unprecedented weakness for the National Rifle Association, with the gun lobby awash in coup attempts and corruption.
Gun control has the aspect of an intractable problem when it is anything but. Inexplicably and abhorrently, we have decided to live with periodic human sacrifices. That became clear in 2012 in Newtown after the slaughter of the “beautiful babies,” as Joe Biden called the dead first graders. If that didn’t shock the soul enough to act, what could?
We’ve heard Mr. Trump talk about talking sense into NRA officials three times now, during the 2016 campaign and after the Parkland shooting and again Friday after his sympathy calls in Dayton and El Paso. The first two times, he caved to the NRA quickly.
Yet temperamentally, Nixon-to-China, Mr. Trump is suited to that job. Even though he’s a belligerent, he’s not so enamored of war and guns.
If he wanted to lead a crusade to get real background checks — or even a ban on assault weapons, which he said in a 2000 book that he favored — he would be formidable.
There is some movement now because the Republicans are scared — not of the shooters but of suburban voters.
If the president and Republicans come up with anything at all, it will be a remedy just marginal enough to give themselves cover, denying Democrats a powerful campaign issue.
But point- blank: Our Republican leaders are cowards.
We shouldn’t let things die down. Because people keep dying.