How do you report on what’s going on when a series of politically targeted mail bombs have been followed by an anti-Semitic massacre and the president who incited both continues to defiantly attack his political enemies while blaming the media? How would you do it if you felt required to pretend it wasn’t all 100 percent outrageous? Yeah, the Washington Post isn’t sure either, leading to one eye-roll, eyebrow-raise, and “oh, no they didn’t” after another, starting with the very first sentence:
Ahead of his Tuesday visit to Pittsburgh, President Trump and his top aides have struggled to balance their scorched-earth campaign strategy with calls for national unity following last weekend’s slaughter of 11 Jewish worshipers in a synagogue there.
Maybe because they shouldn’t be trying to pursue both aims at the same time, particularly in light of the fact that the shooter was apparently motivated in part by Trump’s attacks on a caravan of asylum-seekers making its way through Mexico. And maybe because the “struggle to balance” is a struggle between Trump’s dominant impulse to continue attacking and a tepid feeling by his aides that he has to do the rock-bottom minimum to look presidential.
Trump’s leadership has been tested first by the shipment of more than a dozen pipe bombs to high-profile Democratic and media targets of the president, and then by the anti-Semitic mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.
The connecting tissue there being that they were attacks based on kinds of hate Trump has encouraged—directly in the case of bomber Cesar Sayoc, but additionally the synagogue shooter was in part inflamed by Trump’s rhetoric on immigration and connected his anger over asylum-seekers to a Jewish relief organization. But it would be inconvenient to the picture of the White House’s “struggle to balance” to point that out.
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In that “struggle to balance,” Trump mouthpiece Sarah Huckabee Sanders spewed lies from the podium on Monday, getting all self-righteous about how wonderfully Trump had responded while lashing out at the media herself. And Trump held a rally hours after the synagogue massacre because, hey, in the Washington Post’s words, “Trump’s advisers privately concede that the president is not particularly good at projecting empathy—and that he does not believe his supporters expect him to seem soft or emotional,” and in Trump’s words, “Rallies are meant to be fun. Rallies are meant to be everything and I said, ‘Tone it done,’ and then you saw the group saying, ‘No, don’t tone it down, don’t tone it down.’ So we had a great rally in Illinois, for some great people, and frankly I think that’s probably the way it should be.” And Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are trying to cover their own asses with one of their carefully timed leaks about how they broke the Sabbath to respond to the mass shooting. And check out this crack White House response:
Senior administration officials dispatched two White House staffers who are Jewish — Avi Berkowitz, a deputy assistant to the president and Kushner adviser, and Jason Greenblatt, the special representative for international negotiations — to Pittsburgh over the weekend. Trump was aware of their trip, and they are planning to stay on the ground until at least after the president’s visit Tuesday.
Can’t you just picture “senior administration officials” looking around in a panic going “Who’s Jewish? You? You’re in international negotiations, but sure, you’re headed to Pittsburgh now” and then after the fact going to Trump to make him “aware” that they’d located a couple of Jews to send for PR purposes.
Trump himself, meanwhile, is heading to Pittsburgh over the objections of the city’s mayor, who pointed out that having the president in town on a day when funerals were being held would overtax the city’s public safety capacity, in addition to being an unwanted incursion by many of the city’s residents.
