Trump Offers Rambling Conspiracy Theories At NRA Convention Like A Wackjob

0
1553

This Friday, President Donald Trump again spoke at the national convention of the National Rifle Association (NRA), where he offered an outlandish mash-up of an array of conspiracy theories tied to the organization’s central premise of “Guns or else!” While in office, Trump hasn’t particularly taken steps to advance the group’s agenda on the national stage; he’s even occasionally directly walked it back like through his ban on bump stocks, which make semi-automatic weapons roughly on par with automatic rifles. Still, there seemed to be no love lost as he palled around with the group that consistently finds a way to turn the conversation towards itself in the aftermath of mass shootings.

Trump even had one figure associated with such an incident on stage with him at one point. While the president stood off to the side, Stephen Willeford spoke for a time, relating the story of his confrontation of a gunman who attacked his church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, killing 26 people. Willeford and another local man helped drive the shooter from the premises, and the attacker ended up killing himself — but not before the dozens and dozens in that church building were killed and injured. Despite their attempts to spin the story another direction, a “good guy with a gun” flatly did not save dozens of people killed via an AR-15, no matter what good he was able to accomplish.

Still, Trump proudly touted his rhetoric to the contrary to the convention audience, sharing:

‘We know that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’

To that end, he AGAIN trotted out the example of the mass shooting attacks that rocked Paris in late 2015, claiming the lives of around 150 people, which he says could have been prevented if there were guns more freely available among those targeted. After he went through the exact same spiel last year, current and former French authorities denounced his rhetoric, demanding respect for the victims and flatly rebuffing the notion that a free flow of firearms could have stemmed the attacks. In fact, they said, such a flow could have made them proceed even more intensely.

Trump doesn’t care.

He offered plenty of other angry rhetoric at this year’s NRA convention too. Going off in some fantasy where he’s a dictator facing attempts to topple his regime from lower level officials, he told the crowd, seeming to refer to investigations of his campaign across the Justice Department and Congress:

‘They tried for a coup, it did not work out so well… And I did not need a gun for that one, did I?… They were trying for an overthrow, and we caught ’em. We caught ’em.’

That is a completely wrong representation of the situation. It’s a lie that only serves to help with frothing up the crowd. Those who have investigated the Trump camp have done so in the face of mountains of tangible evidence and even unveiled dozens of real criminal charges that roped in half a dozen of Trump’s associates. Yet, this kind of complete disconnection from reality only continues to define the president’s message.

As journalist Aaron Rupar put it:

‘Trump’s NRA speech indicated his 2020 message will be all about demonizing Democrats as traitorous gun-grabbers who want to impose socialism and tried to take him out with a coup’

Featured Image via screenshot