You’d think at this point that political leaders like Donald Trump would have learned how to keep their mouth shut. At least, you’d think that after a year of supposedly “fake news,” the president would learn how to speak in a way so as to avoid criticism, if he was really so concerned about the criticism in the first place.
He’s learned no such thing.
Early Sunday morning saw the latest in a string of deadly train wrecks, when an Amtrak train slammed into an apparently at the time stationary freight train in South Carolina. Two people were killed and over a hundred people were transported to area hospitals with an array of injuries.
The president took it upon himself to comment on Twitter about the incident, and although sure, his sentiments are “nice,” it’s not as though he’s expressing them in a vacuum.
He wrote:
‘My thoughts and prayers are with all of the victims involved in this mornings train collision in South Carolina. Thank you to our incredible First Responders for the work they’ve done!’
You’d be hard pressed to find a tragedy to which some prominent Republican did not respond with “thoughts and prayers.” Normally the context of the “thoughts and prayers” is a gun violence incident, and you’d think that considering the amount of scorn that the GOP has received for their “thoughts and prayers” that they’d at least slightly alter their script.
They haven’t, as the president’s tweet indicates.
Reinforcing the idea that Republicans literally treat the “thoughts and prayers” routine as scripted, once, last year, the president responded to a mass shooting incident by posting a “thoughts and prayers” message to Twitter — and naming the wrong town.
After a November shooting at the Rancho Tehema Elementary School in northern California, Trump tweeted a message offering condolences, incorrectly identifying the location of the shooting as Sutherland Springs, Texas, where a horrific mass shooting had, in fact, occurred, simply earlier in the month.
In the case of gun violence incidents that give Republicans the occasion to offer “thoughts and prayers,” the GOP rarely, if ever, proposes any kind of concrete action to back up their “thoughts and prayers.”
There’s a similar context for the president’s “thoughts and prayers” offered on the occasion of the South Carolina train wreck.
Although the president has long touted the idea that he’s gearing up to fix American infrastructure once and for all — or something — his team has yet to produce any sensible plan for actually doing that.
Recently, the White House unveiled a plan to enact $200 billion in new federal spending on infrastructure, while counting on other interests, including local governments, to come up with a whopping $1.3 trillion.
Some nuggets for the infrastructure enthusiasts this am. Trump plan:
*Spends $200b in fed $ over 10
*Assumes states/locals/private sector spend add’l $1.3T
*No new taxes (fed $ comes from unspecified budget cuts)
*Congress gets wide latitude on detailshttps://t.co/Ybg0penhtd— Jim Tankersley (@jimtankersley) February 1, 2018
Counting on state and local governments to match federal funds to that degree is outrageous and essentially unprecedented.
On top of this, the White House indicated that the federal cash added to the new infrastructure plan would come from something like cuts to social programs, something that can be expected to garner opposition from both Congressional Democrats and many Americans.
But hey, thoughts and prayers, right?
Check out Twitter’s response to the president below.
Featured Image via Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images
