It’s 10PM on Saturday and the last two hours of this day can’t run out fast enough. This is one of those days that definitely needs to be over. Not that time or distance will improve it. Not only did this day show that the Antisemitism festering in too many places, and too many people, in America can erupt in moments of horrible violence, it was a reminder that no healing is possible so long as Donald Trump remains center stage. Trump took a grieving nation today and rubbed salt in every wound. Rather than acknowledging the issues, he blamed the victims. Rather than look for solutions, he demanded more death. Rather than providing consolation, he complained about how hard this day was for … Donald Trump.
By the way, if you were watching yesterday for Abbreviated Science Round-up or This Week in Space … first off, bless you. But the events of the day demanded that those pieces, even though they might have provided a diversion, just were not possible against the pace and content of the day’s news. Expect these features to return in two weeks, once the election is in the rear view.
Okay, let’s read some pundits. The weird thing is … many of these articles were written earlier in the week. It’s almost as if they were sadly, horribly, prescient. Except that the events of the last two days were all too easy to predict. The word is … inevitable.
Leonard Pitts on how Donald Trump promotes violence in the name of politics.
Miami Herald
He just can’t help himself, can he? Seems like every time he opens his mouth, out falls the bovine excreta, great lumps of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance.
He was at it again Wednesday. The mind reeled as Trump, arguably America’s most enthusiastic proponent of political violence, made a statement deploring political violence. This, as investigators sought the person or persons who sent explosive devices to CNN as well as to Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Maxine Waters, Eric Holder and other prominent critics of Trump’s chaos presidency.
No, Trump isn’t the first president to say something at sharp variance with what he said before. Obama once claimed he never said, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” George W. Bush once claimed his administration never advocated “stay the course” in Iraq.
This is an article that Leonard Pitts wrote on Thursday. What was the topic of the day? How Donald Trump was inspiring violence against his opponents. In fact, Trump’s uniquely negative ways in which Trump demonizes his opponents — crooked, lying, enemies of the people, evil — and the way he has from the beginning encouraged his followers to engage in fantasies of violence toward protesters, toward his opponents, and towards the media didn’t just lay the groundwork for the events of the last few days. It made them all but inevitable.
Synagogue Shooting
Colbert King on the physical and emotional battering of the nation.
Washington Post
I’m losing it again right now, but this time “it” is my temper. Here we have Robert Bowers, 46 years old, with a social media account filled with anti-Semitic posts, and armed with an assault rifle and handguns. He walks into a synagogue, allegedly killing 11 people and injuring several more, and the president of the United States could only bring himself to say how “terrible” it is, that “something has to be done,” and then came up with the suggestion: Place more armed guards inside synagogues. Oh yes, then he offered a way forward: “I think they should very much bring the death penalty into vogue.”
Each day, I wake up hoping to come up with at least one reason not to dislike President Trump. Each day, I fail. More armed guards in synagogues? Four police officers, presumably all armed, were shot at the synagogue Saturday. Waggle the death penalty threat? Yeah, Bowers is no doubt shaking in his boots — or laughing his head off.
Donald Trump’s press appearances on Saturday were, unbelievably after two years of watching Trump, his worst since entering the contest. Yes, worse than “murders and rapist.” Worse that “very fine people.” To be uglier to the victims, the families, and the nation, Trump would have had to pull down his trousers. And at least that would have been a more honest expression of his feelings.
Pittsburgh, Jeffersontown. Today in America, no one and no place are safe. Losing it? There are no words for how I’m feeling.
Karen Tumulty and the word of the day.
Washington Post
“This wicked act of mass murder is pure evil, hard to believe, and frankly, something that is unimaginable,” President Trump said of the carnage that took place Saturday in a Pittsburgh synagogue where worshipers had gathered to celebrate the dawn of a new life.
Unimaginable?
If only that were true.
To anyone who has been paying attention, the slaughter that took place at the Tree of Life Synagogue seemed not only imaginable but also inevitable.
There it is. With the way Trump has been whipping up support for violence, the issue isn’t if, but when. Honestly, it’s not even when. It’s how often?
It was not inevitable just because anti-Semitic activity, including hate crimes in schools and bomb threats against Jewish institutions, has been soaring — up an unprecedented 57 percent last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League. That is the symptom. The cause is a climate in which the sentiments of white nationalists and other hate groups are no longer suppressed. …
In the Trump era, people who should be shunned are embraced, and made practically mainstream. Some who call themselves our political leaders even go out of their way to do it. This month, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) ventured into Canadian politics with an endorsement of Faith Goldy, a white-supremacist fringe candidate running for mayor of Toronto:
It’s not enough for them that they drown the United States in authoritarian nationalism. Because … that’s never enough for nationalists.
Max Boot gets a chance to see if a he can get through this without sliding into both-siderisms.
Washington Post
How can we live in an America where a gunman can barge into a synagogue and open fire, reportedly screaming “All Jews must die”?
How can we live in an America where someone — the FBI has arrested a Trump supporter named Cesar Sayoc — can send pipe bombs to, among others, former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), financier George Soros, former CIA director John Brennan and CNN?
This is not what America is about. We are a country dedicated to freedom of speech, press, assembly and religion. We are a nation of immigrants from all corners of the globe brought together in mutual dedication to the “self-evident” truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” All “men” means, in the language of the 18th century, all people of whatever gender or color or creed.
There is no exception for liberals or Jews or critics of the president.
That’s a good start.
The fault does not lie, as President Trump insists, with those in the media (e.g., “lowly rated CNN”) who have the temerity to question and criticize him. ...
Nor does the fault lie, as Trump’s supposedly reasonable supporters insist, with “both sides.” ...
I, too, have criticized the incivility of Democrats. Hounding officials in restaurants is a mistake. Comparing Trump to Hitler is wrong. But those errors cannot be spoken of in the same breath with terrible crimes such as sending pipe bombs or opening fire in a synagogue.
That’s an honest response. I don’t say that because it’s “nicer” to the left. I say it because criticizing Trump or upsetting Mitch McConnell’s dinner cannot be spoken of in the same breath as what happened in Pittsburgh on Saturday.
MAGA Bomber and Trumpian violence
Jill Abramson on how Trump’s encouragement of violence took the form of pipe bombs.
The Guardian
This week, pipe bombs were sent to prominent Democrats including George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. CNN also received one in the mail. Sadly, none of this was really that shocking. The news had an air of inevitability, being the culmination of what has been a hideously violent time in our political culture. Poison is coursing through the US body politic. Violence permeates political dialogue and sometimes erupts at political events.
The shocking thing is that some of the violence has been endorsed by the president himself.
At a rally last week in Missoula, Montana, President Trump celebrated the Republican representative Greg Gianforte, who violently attacked the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs last year. Jacobs, who was simply trying to ask a question about healthcare, was body-slammed and hurt by Gianforte, who won election to the House but later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault. At the rally last Thursday, Trump cheered the congressman as a “tough cookie”, and roused his supporters by loudly proclaiming: “Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of guy.”
Trump has repeatedly invited his supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies, implying that the protesters bring this on themselves by disrupting him.
The only thing more shocking than how readily Republicans dismissed the suggestion that Trump’s previous calls to violence represented a genuine threat, is how rapidly they’ll do it next time.
Andrew Gawthorpe on how the MAGA bomber reveals “America's rotting core”
The Guardian
Political violence in the United States has tended to come in two forms. The first consists of simply unhinged acts, like John Hinckley Jr shooting Ronald Reagan in the hope of impressing the actress Jodie Foster, or Timothy McVeigh hoping to bring down the government with a bomb. The second is more systematic and sinister: the violence used to keep down groups who threaten the social and political order. This is the violence of strikebreakers and the KKK. It is the violence that killed Emmett Till, an African-American teenager who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after allegedly wolf-whistling at a white woman.
Note again that this is an essay that was written before Robert Bowers stepped into Tree of Life Synagogue on Saturday. And even before the MAGA bomber was identified as Cesar Sayoc.
It is no surprise that this febrile atmosphere, in which any lie can be justified if it paints the president’s opponents as traitors, would lead to violence. But what is particularly disturbing is that the propaganda that inspires this violence has been outsourced to private organizations, meaning no simple change of government by election can end it. Nowadays, even the president himself gets his daily talking points by parroting Fox News, which he believes over his own government officials. The rot is pernicious and deep, and it will inevitably lead to more violence.
There’s that word again. And honestly, go read the rest.
Richard Wolffe finishes off a trio of Gaurdian writers looking at the bombs and the bomb-culture.
The Guardian
Normal people call a coordinated series of bombs something as simple as terrorism. This White House calls them “terrorizing acts”, presumably performed by actors rather than terrorists.
For a group that campaigned on its desire to talk about “radical Islamic terrorism”, this is perplexing. Terrorism is meant to sow confusion and fear, but there’s nothing quite as befuddling to the Trumpsters as what appears to be anti-liberal terrorism. ...
When he finally emerged to condemn the terrorism, Trump couldn’t bring himself to say the word. Instead he conjured up something altogether different. “Acts and threats of political violence have no place in the United States of America,” he said at the start of an event about opioid addiction.
Donald Trump famously advertised that he was “politically incorrect,” leading many to believe that he was in some indefinable sense “brave” or “honest” when discussing political affairs. Neither of those things was ever true, of course. But the timidity of Trump has rarely been clearer than it has this week. And in a segue to the next topic …
When it comes to the Great Terrorist Threat from the Southern Border, the White House has no idea how this country can respond. Faced with several thousand people several weeks away from its border, America is all but naked and helpless.
Hungry parents and tired children searching for a better life are terrifying to Trump. Really.
The “Caravan”
Dana Milbank on Trump’s artificial emergency and very real racism.
Washington Post
[Trump] declared an “emergency” because he claims (without evidence) that a migrant procession on foot 1,000 miles from U.S. territory is supposedly infiltrated by “MS-13” and “unknown Middle Easterners.” He rushed troops to the border to keep migrants from “pouring” over, though the few who complete the journey won’t be here for weeks. And now the White House is talking about blocking all Central Americans, even asylum seekers, from crossing the southern border — to prevent “animals” and “some very bad people” from an “assault on our country.”
Behind Trump’s manufactured menace is a cynical calculation. If the anti-immigrant campaign provokes a strong enough backlash among Hispanic voters, they could easily vote Republicans out of power in the House, and from Senate and gubernatorial seats in parts of the country. They have the power, theoretically, to quash these nativist appeals once and for all. But Trump expects to mobilize more whites than Hispanics with his histrionics.
And of course Trump, and other Republicans, have insisted that someone is funding those immigrants and encouraging them to come to the United States. That someone, according to alt-Reich sources, is Jewish billionaire George Soros. And that conspiracy theory was the direct cause of the attack on Tree of Life.
There is no shortage of ugliness to offend many a moderate, suburban voter: family separation, belittling Puerto Ricans’ suffering after the hurricane, failing to help the “dreamers,” the pardon of Joe Arpaio, stripping Latinos in Texas of their passports and a long series of belittling remarks (such as marveling that a Latino border guard “speaks perfect English”). Republican candidates and groups, taking the president’s lead, have run a number of ads playing on racial fears.
Trump’s attempt to turn Latinos into a subject of fear is a tool that has benefited Trump, but generated a cost measured in lives — not all of them Latino.
Plain old Racism
Leonard Pitts gets a second go this week. Because you deserve a double dose in a week like this.
Miami Herald
I have a question for white people.
I will preface it with an excerpt from a recent email sent by a reader named James. He wrote: “It is the blacks who are by far the most racist of all people as they can’t seem to simply forget their damn color and move on with life, get more education and skills, manage their money, stay married, stay out of crime and live a good life.”
I share this email not because it’s surprising, but, rather, because it’s common. Indeed, it’s a rare day when I don’t get three just like it before lunch.
The way I had this presented to me this week was someone who said they were happy for blacks to be equal — so long as it didn’t cost him anything. Including the money, privilege, and position he held. Which sounds a lot like inequality.
Which brings me to the aforementioned question for white people — or at least, for white people who, like James, fret about African-American bigotry. The question is this:
How, precisely, does all this “black racism” impact your life?
You know what I’m going to say? Go read the rest of Pitt’s column. There. That really was inevitable.