To say that the Trump administration has been marked by volatility would be an understatement. Considering the circumstances, it’s remarkable that the president was even to get his one major legislative accomplishment — an overhaul of the tax system — signed into law late last year.
The focus of the nation while Trump has been in power has been on an endless cascade of scandal, including among the most recent hot button issues, the fact that White House staff secretary Rob Porter was allowed to work in the White House in the face of alleged long internally known and credible allegations of domestic abuse against him.
Last week, as all of this raged on in Washington, D.C., an expelled student returned to their former high school in Parkland, Florida, and opened fire, killing 17 people and wounding many more.
The president has been criticized for his response to the shooting. Quite simply, he has paid essentially no public attention to calls for common sense gun control and has instead gone back to his favorite pastime — angrily tweeting about the Russia scandal.
An unnamed official in his administration has now offered their own response to the Parkland shooting while speaking to The Washington Post, and it’s heinous to say the least.
In the story published Monday about the partial break from being in the public eye that the White House has taken in recent days, the publication revealed that a Trump administration commented about the shooting as follows:
‘For everyone, it was a distraction or a reprieve. A lot of people here felt like it was a reprieve from seven or eight days of just getting pummeled… But as we all know, sadly, when the coverage dies down a little bit, we’ll be back through the chaos.’
According to the publication, the official pointed to the mourning that gripped the United States after the mass shooting late last year in Las Vegas, Nevada, as an example for the kind of “reprieve” they were talking about.
That’s right; instead of, say, this official bemoaning the fact that the president acts in such a way so as to spark these controversies in the first place, this is the line of reasoning being held to inside Trump’s White House — “There was a school shooting but at least we don’t have to own up to our problems for now.”
The issues faced by the Trump White House in recent weeks include some sparked by the behavior of the president’s Cabinet members and not just those sparked by his own actions.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin was revealed recently to have allegedly corruptly accepted free Wimbledon tickets and taxpayer funding for airfare for his wife, besides spending a good portion of the time he was supposed to be on the job during a trip last year sightseeing.
Shukin isn’t the first Cabinet secretary to become involved in a travel scandal; one prompted Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price to resign last year.
Besides these issues, the Russia investigation of course remains ongoing, with recent reports suggesting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has turned his attention to the business transactions of Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.
Featured Image via Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
