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| Why is Donald happy? |
Mod: It has to be that Trump thinks there are plenty of people stupid enough to believe him.
Trump just blamed the El Paso shooting victims for their own deaths (
Washington Postlink): Over the weekend, a white man with a semiautomatic rifle went on a shooting rampage at an
El Paso Walmart, killing 22 people.
President Trump, who averred that we cannot let the victims “
die in vain,” offered an idea for how to prevent future shootings: “
Republicans and
Democrats must come together and get strong background checks, perhaps marrying this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform. We must have something good, if not GREAT, come out of these two tragic events!”
It’s a shame about the deaths, in other words, but they never would have happened if immigrants didn’t keep trying to come here, and if
Democrats would just let me stop them. “So, this atrocity,” as
Nicole Hannah-Jones aptly summed up his view, “was caused by immigration.”
Having essentially blamed the victims for their own murders, the president was happily and enthusiastically acceding to what authorities think are the alleged killer’s specific demands.
“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of
Texas,” says an anti-immigrant online manifesto that authorities think the accused gunman posted. It echoes the “
invasion” rhetoric commonly employed by the president at his rallies and on
Twitter.
In fact, much of the language overlaps with that of the president and his supporters, including repeated entreaties to “
send them back.” The idea here is that some sort of bipartisan immigration reform would stop the epidemic of white-supremacist violence in the
United States.
But of course that makes sense only if you believe that racist killers have a legitimate complaint — that we shouldn’t have
Latino immigrants, and that, therefore, they do bear some of the blame. (Never mind that people of
Hispanic descent existed in
El Paso long before that region was part of the
United States.) This was the idea, too, behind
Trump’s common warning, reiterated last month, that if migrants didn’t like the detention centers along the border, they could simply not come.
It’s hard to imagine the manifesto’s author being any happier with the results of his campaign. His message — that the country is in danger of being lost in a wave of immigration — has been heard loud and clear by the man who very likely influenced his thinking in the first place, or at least supercharged it. What happens to migrants next is up to them, the president and the manifesto’s author agree. Don’t want to die? Don’t come.
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