What a vile scumbag is this Trump. The last bodies hadn’t even been carried out of the Pulse nightclub, the parents of the dead and injured hadn’t even all been notified, when this SOB started running his filthy mouth off like an aberrant fire hose to try to capitalize politically on one of the worst tragedies in American history.
From The New Yorker:
It feels indecent on such a day to engage these comments of Trump’s at all. But their velocity, vapidity, and sheer ugliness reflect his character, his emptiness, and, most of all, the shape of the election campaign to come. Since Trump has ascended, it’s been clear that his demagogic instincts could be tested precisely by the sort of tragedy suffered in Orlando. And, when faced with the path of modesty and the path of dark opportunism, he has chosen the latter. That’s what he is about. It’s who he is.
In less than 24 hours, Trump did his utmost to put the focus not on the dead, the wounded, not on the grieving families, not even on the shooter or the investigation into what caused this heinous crime but on himself:
The mouth moves and the lies pour forth. Any contrary evidence, any complexity, is foreign. Questioned on television to prove his points, faced with contrary evidence, he talks past it. Never mind all the firepower expended against ISIS targets, the territory gained, and the difficulty of taking back cities when ordinary civilians are used, en masse, as human shields. We are weak; we are politically correct.In less than 24 hours he managed to congratulate himself (for what, no one has any idea), suggest that the President was involved in the murders, attack Hillary Clinton as “weak” (she apparently made the mistake of being respectful to the families of the dead), accuse American Muslims of encouraging the attacks, and whine about the coverage he's receiving. Trump clearly believes he has hit the jackpot with these killings and views them as a political gift.
As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post observes, this was Trump’s first opportunity to demonstrate any semblance of character or ability to lead the country, and he failed it miserably. If anything, Sargent suggests, Trump’s bizarre inability to control his own mouth is reminiscient of Mitt Romney’s rush to judgment after the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, where Romney prematurely jumped to pin the blame on something he had made no effort whatsover to understand, revealed himself as an ignorant, opportunistic fool, and was roundly criticized for his inability to control himself—or his mouth--during a crisis.
General presidential elections are brutally difficult: Without warning, they serve up moments that pose severe tests to the character and temperament of those vying for the Oval Office, and split-second decisions about how to respond to them end up creating lasting impressions that can prove unshakable. In retrospect, we may look back at Trump’s response to the Orlando shooting as his very own Romney/Benghazi moment — only far worse.
Trump’s moral vacancy was made even more apparent in the reactions of leaders who have actually had to address the spectre of terrorism, domestic or international:
President Obama, in his statement, displayed a sense of calm resolution, grief, and outrage—as he has done repeatedly, after mass shootings in Binghamton, Fort Hood, Tucson, Aurora, Oak Creek, Overland Park, Newtown, Chapel Hill, Charleston, Chattanooga, San Bernardino, and elsewhere. Hillary Clinton, too, issued a statement that was rational, heartfelt, and touched on all the necessary aspects of the killings as we know them thus far—terrorism, the need to go on battling terrorism, the preposterously easy availability of guns, the victimization of the L.G.B.T. community.
The horror in Orlando was unspeakable. And we will learn much more about it in the days ahead. But today the event was made that much worse by a Presidential candidate who seeks to lead the country in complicated times and in its darker moments with self-aggrandizing tweets and hollow words.
Four and one half more months of this asshole is far more than this country should have to tolerate.