A quick glance on Donald Trump’s Twitter feed following any serious tragedy is enough to make Americans cry for the days of President Obama, but his tweets following the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas on Saturday were even more horrifyingly self-centered and lacking in compassion than usual.
After finishing his golf game, Trump make a quick mention of the shooting, then immediately followed that with a retweet of a celebrity shout-out. Shortly afterward, presumably around the time that the El Paso shooter was being called out for his alleged ties to white supremacy, his alleged support of Trump, and his deep-seated hatred for immigrants, Trump began rapidly retweeting support from his black friends, including one who called the 80 percent of black Americans who vote Democrat “Know Nothing Blacks.”
The outcry over what is suspected to be the second mass shooting in one week from a white supremacist also follows testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray, who said that just under half of all arrests due to domestic terrorism in the United States in 2017 were white supremacists. Meanwhile, Trump and his GOP cronies have ramped up fear-mongering as the 2020 elections loom about violence from ANTIFA, undocumented immigrants, and cities heavily populated by black Americans.
To be clear, Trump is not the founder of racism; racism existed in the United States long before Trump came down an elevator to announce his candidacy in 2015 by calling undocumented Mexican immigrants rapist and drug dealers, and hundreds of year before he rose to political prominence with his racist birther campaign. The effects of his rhetoric and emboldening of white supremacists, however, cannot be ignored. Another mass shooting on Saturday proves that.
Twitter was stunned by the president’s lack of empathy and focus on self-preservation. Read some of their comments below:
Featured image via Flickr by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license
