When a tragedy occurs, the last person anyone wants around is an insensitive, egomaniacal, self-centered boor who’s already shown exactly how little he cares. In October, following a mass shooting at a Jewish synagogue in New York, Trump was asked not to come and make the funerals about him. He was asked to be respectful and leave police and other public officials to focus on safety and protecting the victims’ families. He went anyway. Now, he’s doing the same in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas.
Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley has specifically asked Trump not to come to Dayton following his response to the mass shooting there that left nine people dead and another 26 injured. Despite this, he plans to visit. Whaley said she has every intention of letting him know just how unhelpful he’s been.
Residents in El Paso signed a community letter to Trump telling him not to come to their city to inflame emotions even further.
‘This is a time of intense grief and mourning, and we appreciate the impulse to comfort the kin of those killed and wounded—however, your presence would bring no comfort, no respite from the pain so brutally and callously imposed upon us. We ask, instead, for your absence. We say this because we recognize that it is your rhetoric and your actions that led us to this terrible moment. This shooter was inspired by your words and your attitudes.’
Since photo ops are important and Trump spent a lot of time criticizing President Obama for not going places Trump thought he should, there’s a matter of saving face to do. The mourning of the victims aren’t nearly as important as Trump being seen on camera on ground, like he falsely said that he was after 9/11, in the middle of a presidential campaign.
Perhaps he can comfort the victims by telling them that he’s tying new common sense gun legislation reform to his immigration policies. That might have comforted them if it wasn’t Trump’s very same immigration policy rhetoric that sparked the mass shooting in the first place.
Twitter was exasperated with Trump’s lack of human decency. Read some of their comments below:
Featured image via Flickr by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license
