President Donald Trump has ceaselessly responded to tragedy, dying and political violence with out the requisite stage of sympathy and sobriety one would count on from a president.
Remember the time he urged {that a} just lately deceased congressman was in hell? Remember his tangles with Gold Star families whose family members have been killed within the line of responsibility? There’s plenty more the place that got here from.
But even by his requirements, Trump has been remarkably callous in current months.
Despite his personal brush with dying in an assassination try in mid-2024, Trump retains saying ugly issues in extremely delicate and tragic moments involving his political opponents.
He made two such feedback Tuesday in a matter of hours.
The massive one was his response to an assault on Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar after a person rushed her and sprayed a syringe of unknown liquid at her throughout a city corridor in Minneapolis. The congresswoman seems to be OK and continued together with her remarks, but it surely was a scary scene – particularly in mild of the massive tensions that exist in her metropolis proper now.
But Trump, who has lashed out at Omar relentlessly and has skilled xenophobic attacks on the broader Somali-American group, wasn’t concerned about urging calm.
When ABC News requested if he had seen video of the attack, the president responded, “No. I don’t think about her. I think she’s a fraud. I really don’t think about that. She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.”
Pressed once more, Trump added: “I haven’t seen it. No, no. I hope I don’t have to bother.”
Police have since arrested a person in reference to third-degree assault.
Just hours earlier, Trump did an interview with Fox News by which he mentioned the current killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by federal brokers in Minneapolis.
Trump urged he felt worse about Good’s dying as a result of her household helps him.
“And I’m not sure about his parents, but I know her parents were big Trump fans,” he mentioned. “Makes me feel bad anyway, but, I mean, I guess you could say even worse. They were tremendous Trump people, Trump fans.”
And his sympathy for Good’s household, in fact, is a comparatively new growth – one which appears to monitor conveniently with him discovering out they supported him.
Shortly after she was killed by an ICE agent earlier this month, Trump instantly set about not simply maligning a lifeless lady, however doing so with a false declare.
He claimed that she “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer,” despite the fact that video doesn’t present the agent being run over. Trump added in an interview with The New York Times that Good had “behaved horribly.”
(Trump this week has distanced himself from some high administration officers’ early messaging about Pretti’s killing, however he definitely set the tone with his own claims about Good.)
There have been additionally a pair of main examples in December.
The ugliest one – and the one for which even many Republicans rebuked Trump – was his social media post after the death of Rob Reiner, a frequent Trump critic.
Within hours of the Hollywood director’s dying being reported, Trump wrote that it was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights” just lately, Trump added.
Later final month, the president posted a series of images of different folks’s social media posts attacking the Kennedy household — amid a dispute over Trump’s effort to add his title to the Kennedy Center — mere hours after it was reported that John F. Kennedy’s 35-year-old granddaughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, had died of most cancers.
And the center of final 12 months introduced one other hanging instance, given Trump’s expertise with two assassination makes an attempt.
While the president initially responded to the assassination of Minnesota Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and the capturing of one other lawmaker the way in which you’d count on — “Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America” — he later signaled he had little interest in calling Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz concerning the matter.
And the rationale was clear: his political distaste for Walz.
“I’m not calling him. Why would I call him?” Trump said three days later. “I could call and say, ‘Hi, how you doing?’ Uh, the guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess. I could be nice and call, but why waste time?”
Trump later softened that, saying he “may” name the Democrat whereas describing him as “a terrible governor” and “a grossly incompetent person.”
Someone had just lately died, however Trump wasn’t about to put aside petty politics and venture unity.
Earlier this month, Trump promoted a debunked conspiracy concept about Hortman’s dying on social media, main the households of each lawmakers to publicly urge Trump to take the post down.
“I am asking President Trump to remove the video that he shared and apologize to me and my family for posting this misinformation and for using my mother’s own words to dishonor her memory,” Hortman’s son, Colin Hortman, mentioned.
More than three weeks later, the submit stays stay on Trump’s feed.