This will be a short diary. I was at an annual get-together of friends on Saturday, August 3, stayed very late, and woke up Sunday to the horrendous news of the spree killings in El Paso and Dayton.
Maybe it was because I learned about the two murder rampages at the same time, but after I learned the basics of the shootings, and the motives that fueled the two shooters, I saw them as bookends, if you will. Two events that, taken together, define Donald Trump as a person and as a president.
El Paso: This was perpetuated by a white male shooter filled with racial hatred and bigotry. You don’t need the links. We already know it. We know that the stochastic terrorism of Donald Trump played a pivotal role in Patrick Crusius’s decision to drive 600 miles to El Paso and gun down as many Hispanic “invaders” as he could. That’s bookend number 1.
Dayton: This was perpetuated by a white male shooter driven by hatred of women. Misogyny gone far, far beyond the all-too-common (and insanely unjust, it should go without saying) antipathy and animus many men feel towards women. Connor Betts, who used state-of-the-art slaughter technology to murder 9 people and wound dozens more, made up “rape lists” of the women he wanted to maul. He was in a “pornogrind” band that played radically hateful songs denigrating and demeaning women. People at his high school knew he was a virulent misogynist. That’s bookend number 2.
Donald Trump, like the El Paso shooter who idolized him and took his words to chilling effect, is a racist and a bigot who inflames his followers to act out on the violence he calls down.
Donald Trump, like the Dayton shooter who emulated him, treats women as playthings, for him to rape, maul and brutalize as he sees fit. These two shootings define him as a person and as a “president.”
31 people are dead. 51 others are injured, some permanently, by weapons of mass destruction given to them by the actions of Trump and his minions in the GOP. Hundreds, thousands more are traumatized by their actions. Their blood, pain and trauma are on Trump’s hands. Nothing he says or does, nothing that anyone else says or writes, can “normalize” this ghoul, this walking construct that masquerades as a human being.
Every time we talk about Trump, we need to frame him in the light of these two massacres that happened a mere 13 hours apart.
He is a bigot. He is a misogynist. He exhorts and inflames violence among the worst of us. He celebrates it. He revels in it. His trips to El Paso and Dayton are to let him dance on the graves of the murdered.
These two spree killings, these two murderous rampages, define him. We will define him by them.
Side note: I am writing this about 2 am my time. I will set it to post about the time I am getting up to go to work later today. I will participate in the discussion as best I can.