August 4, 2019: No Other President Has Ever Hated More Americans

 

8/4/19: Sunday, shock and anger turn to outrage. Americans wake to the news that there has been a second bloody slaughter, this time in Dayton, Ohio. Nine dead. Twenty-seven wounded. 

The shooter manages to inflict this damage in thirty-two seconds. Fortunately, nearby police on patrol arrive and shoot him dead. The killer is using a drum magazine, holding 100 rounds. 

He’s carrying an assault-style rifle, of course. We learn later that he’s wearing a mask, body armor and hearing protection. His attack, like the attack in El Paso, has been carefully planned. 

Trump never talks about white guy mass murderers.

Doesn't fit his narrative.

 

Are video games the problem? 

Numbed by the news, I rub sleep from my eyes and turn to Fox News to see how the story is covered. Rep. Kevin McCarthy is guest on Maria Bartiromo’s show. If you watch much Fox, you can predict what she’s going to ask – and if you’ve ever listened to McCarthy, you know his answer. 

Bartiromo wonders if McCarthy believes video games are the problem. “Is this mental?” she adds. 

(Fuck, I mutter under my breathe.)

 

McCarthy refers to the killers as “monsters,” but utters not a syllable about how we can keep automatic weapons out of monsters’ hands. 

Bartiromo talks about anger on social media. “Words matter,” she says. 

(Yes, we know.)

 

We can predict, again, that they won’t bring up the fact Trump recently complained about crime in Baltimore but failed to offer help. He mocked the city and its mostly African American political leadership (the “other” in the eyes of his predominantly white base), using the homicide rate to score political points. It should have been a vomit-inducing moment for anyone possessed of normal human emotions. It was no surprise coming from Trump. 

The Baltimore Sun provided an outraged summary of events: 

Minutes into his Thursday night campaign rally in Cincinnati, President Donald Trump continued his nearly weeklong bashing of the city of Baltimore.

 

Early in his speech, the Republican president railed against cities led by Democrats.

 

“The Democrat record is one of neglect and corruption and decay, total decay,” Trump said to applause.

 

He then turned to Baltimore.

 

“The homicide rate in Baltimore is significantly higher than El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala,” Trump told his supporters. He paused.

 

“Gimme a place that you think is pretty bad. Gimme a place,” Trump said, adopting the intonation of a stand-up comic and motioning to someone in the crowd. “The guy says, ‘Afghanistan.’ I believe it’s higher than Afghanistan. In our country. Think of that.”

 

Trump’s voice turned sarcastic.

 

“If we’re wrong, they’ll tell us tomorrow. It’ll be headlines: ‘Trump exaggerated.’ I do believe the rate is higher than Afghanistan,” the president said.

 

Trump doesn’t really care about the blood and the gore. Trump is scoring points with his base by instilling fear of the “other.” The African Americans in a crime-ridden city. The Muslim mayor and the Muslim immigrant in London. 

“Stab-city.” 

The “other,” in Trump’s telling, those people with menacing, darker faces. “Cockroaches,” one might start to believe. (See: 8/3/19.)

 

* 

I SOON GIVE UP on Fox News and begin switching between channels and go online for information. 

First, we can start with Trump’s tone-deaf comments about Baltimore and his misplaced concern. It’s a city of 610,000 and suffered 318 murders last year. The president turns this bloody mess into a point of mockery. He’s not going to visit Baltimore or any of the other cities that have worse murder rates, not even crime-ridden cities in the reddest of states. He’s going to stick to private golf clubs every weekend instead. Statistics vary slightly, but in 2018, Baltimore was the seventh most deadly city in the U.S., with .52 murders for every 10,000 residents. East St. Louis was worst with 1.0 murders per 10,000. Lakeworth, Florida rounded out the “Top 30,” with .26. 

What about London, where a Muslim mayor runs the show and Muslim immigrants run amok with machetes in their hands? 

The city of 8,100,000 had 119 homicides as of November 13 last year, putting it on pace for 140 for the year. 

That rate would be .02 homicides per 10,000. 

Stabbings and all.

 

* 

We’ve seen this gory scene play out before. 

A SUNDAY AFTERNOON spent channel surfing proves grim. We’ve seen this gory scene play out before. What were the killer’s motives? Pundits offer theories. Police describe the armament employed. Politicians agree that lessons must be learned. A trauma surgeon in El Paso stands before the cameras and updates us on the condition of the wounded. Shaken survivors in Dayton describe what they saw in the dark hours Sunday morning. Then they weep. Even law enforcement authorities weep. Experts appear on every cable channel and describe the warning signs if you think someone you know, or know of, might have violent intent. Journalists look glum. 

Jake Tapper on CNN seems unusually stony-faced. Words matter, of course. He wonders if Trump’s words have fueled the hate. In May, for example, this exchange at a Trump rally occurred. Tapper plays a clip. Trump asks the crowd for ideas to block migrants trying to cross the border: 

“How do you stop these people?” he asks.

 

“Shoot them!” a man in the audience shouts.

 

The crowd laughs and Trump smiles. “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff,” he says. “Only in the Panhandle.”

 

So, the killer in El Paso does just that. He drives down to the border and opens fire, just like the man at the rally said.

 

* 

THIS MUCH WAS OBVIOUS from the start. Trump is a hater of the worst kind. We had our first warning when Trump claimed for six years that President Obama (the “other” in right-wing land) wasn’t a U.S. citizen. Candidate Trump relented in a nine-word statement in 2016, only because campaign advisers warned his perceived racism was hurting his chances of winning. 

Like Hitler and every other demagogue, Trump stirs crowds to hate for his own ends. Hate and fear Obama. Hate Mexicans, those dark-skinned “others,” those “murderers” and “rapists” that he talked about on the day he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower, hoping terrified Americans would soon vote for him. Like any demagogue, Trump set out to foster fear. 

Since taking office, he has lashed out in all directions as only a skilled hater can. N.F.L. players who protested police brutality and protested the president’s policies, were “sons of bitches.” That is: You had a U.S. president labeling the mothers of African American football players “bitches.” 

And maybe, he added, those players “shouldn’t be in this country” at all. 

 

No other president has ever hated more Americans. 

Is the president a racist? Trump hates so many groups and so many individuals, it’s hard to tell. Hitler had his “untermenschen” or “under men.” The Jews were “vermin” who must be extirpated. Trump retweets Katie Hopkins, with her “cockroach” comparisons and complains about “lowlifes” again and again. Andy McCabe, Ted Cruz, Elizabeth Warren and Omarosa – who he hired to work at the White House – are lowlifes. Omarosa is also a “dog.” Criminals are rabid “animals” in Trump’s mind. As such, they can be shot on sight. Muslims, as a group, are a terrorist threat. By the thousands, Trump claimed, they cheered in New Jersey on 9/11 when the Twin Towers fell. That hate-based claim won him a “Pants on Fire” rating from political fact-checking sites; but the seeds of hate took root, exactly as he hoped. 

Trump hates so many people, it’s difficult to keep track of all whom he despises. He hated and still hates Obama. He hates Alec Baldwin and the producers of Saturday Night Live. He hates Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro. He hated John McCain most of all. He hates Jeff Bezos and Peggy Noonan and Don Lemon and LeBron James. He hates Rosie O’Donnell and calls her a “fat pig,” and Stormy Daniels, the porn star with whom he had sex, who he refers to as “horseface” now. 

Dehumanization is Trump’s stock in trade.

 

Stoke hate. Stoke fear. That’s what this president does. Race can be Trump’s fuel. Religion can be his fuel. Hate of the “other” can be his fuel. Fear that America is being destroyed by “liberals” can be his fuel. “I don’t believe the four Congresswomen are capable of loving our country,” he says recently, stirring the anger and hate, referring to four female Democratic lawmakers. It’s “our country,” he wants supporters to believe. It’s not their country. The four may be American citizens. No matter. They are “other.” Two are Muslim American. All four have brown skin. But they are “weak & insecure people who can never destroy our great Nation.” 

“Our great Nation.” 

Not the nation of those “others.”

 

In tweet after tweet, Trump employs the word “destroy” to provoke irrational fear. Obama, he claimed, was out to destroy the “American dream.” Obama didn’t love this country. According to Trump, his enemies never do. “If @BarackObama really loved this country, he wouldn’t be destroying it.” Obama destroyed our children’s futures. He destroyed the middle class. “Obama is destroying the U.S.,” Trump once howled. 

Trump’s world is crammed with enemies. Paranoia is a guiding light. When five police in Dallas were gunned down by a black man in 2016 – a heinous act without doubt – Trump stoked the fear of “others” again, this time the “criminal” blacks. “Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation,” he warned at the Republican National Convention that July. “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life [emphasis added].” 

The killer of those officers was a hater, too. All haters are fundamentally alike. Some hate the Jews. Some hate the police. Some hate reporters who question what they say and do. 

 

Trump does not rail about these shootings. 

You might have thought, after these most recent killings, that Trump would be fired up about all the white mass murderers, who have done even worse damage than the Dallas murderer. These attackers are home-grown white men. These are haters who shot up Santa Fe, Texas (10 students and teachers killed), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (11 cut down at the Tree of Life synagogue), Thousand Oaks, California (12 killed in a bar), Parkland, Florida (17 students and teachers riddled with bullets), Sutherland Springs, Texas (26 slaughtered at prayer), and Las Vegas, Nevada (58 massacred with music in their ears). Trump does not rail about these shootings because the shooters are not “other.”  He cannot use them to stir the hate of his base. 

No American president has ever hated more Americans. He hates “liberals” and Democrats. Special Counsel Robert Mueller headed up a “gang of Democratic thugs.” The Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia planned to “destroy a great state.” Reporters who criticize the president are “crazed lunatics.” They are, in his view, “enemies of the people,” a line that echoes Herr Hitler in 1933. People who investigated his campaign and its many contacts with Russians were guilty of “TREASON.” Democrats who don’t support his border wall are “treasonous,” too.

 

Trump is master of the hater’s game – and his hateful words matter a great deal. Patrick Crusius, the suspect in the El Paso shooting, says in a 2,300-word “manifesto” that he was “simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” 

“My country,” he says. 

Trump’s words echo loud.

August 5, 2019: The Nation Mourns El Paso and Dayton Massacres

 

8/5/19: The nation comes to grips with the tragic events of the weekend. TV screens fill with sad images. Three daughters of David Johnson talk with Anderson Cooper. They tell him their dad shielded their mother and a nine-year-old granddaughter when the El Paso killer opened fire at point blank range. Johnson was hit several times and paid with his life. 

All three young women start to cry. 

 

____________________ 

The problem Trump doesn’t dare address is the problem itself.

____________________

 

 

The name of Arturo Benavides, 60, scrolls across the screen. An army veteran, who liked to talk about his time in the service, Benavides was killed not on a battlefield but shopping at a store. Maribel Latin, describes being wounded in the arm and the foot, playing dead, counting shots fired as she lay. She feared the next bullet might be for her. Paul Gilbert Anchondo, age two months, was grazed by a bullet but survived. Both parents were killed. Now he’s a “mass murderer orphan.” So are his sisters, Skylin, 5, and Victoria, 2. Javier Amir Rodriguez, 15, played soccer in high school last year. He won’t be playing again this fall. Angelina Englisbee, 86, survived eight decades on earth, only to be cut down at Walmart. 

The husband of Elsa Libora Marquez speaks, in a sense, for all the grieving families, when he remembers his wife in a Facebook post. “I say goodbye to my partner, the most wonderful woman, a being full of life who will continue to light our path [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] for the time that life gives us…we will miss you my love!!!!” 

The story in Dayton is equally bloody and grim. Megan Betts, the “bubbly” sister of the killer, is among those gunned down. Derrick Fudge, 57, is purchasing food at a taco truck when caught by a burst of semi-automatic fire. Lois Oglesby, 27, a young mother, will never tuck her two daughters in bed again. Logan Turner, 30, described by his mother “as the world’s best son,” is dead.

 

* 

Pitting group against group. 

AT 10:00 A.M., President Trump appears before cameras in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room. VP Pence stands, a step back, at his side. Trump talks about what he believes must be done. 

A “wicked man,” he says, went to Walmart in El Paso and opened fire. In Dayton, a “twisted monster” blasted innocent bystanders at a popular night-life spot. The president’s speech hits mostly correct notes, although Trump seems to be delivering it with the enthusiasm of a child served succotash. He appears to be reciting what’s on the teleprompter and doesn’t appear moved. 

“These barbaric slaughters are an assault on our communities,” he recites, “a crime against all humanity.” It is odd to hear the words “all humanity” issue from his lips. Trump spent his entire time running for office, and all his time since, dividing humanity into groups and pitting group against group. 

Still, he soldiers on, saying, at least three years too late, that, “in one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul.”

 

This blogger freely admits he finds this president to be a despicable human being. He would credit Trump for such words if he thought they came from someplace in his heart. But it’s easy to check the internet site which compiles all of Trump’s tweets. The site allows a search by word or phrase. 

The phrase, “all humanity” has never appeared. 

“Hate,” however, comes up hundreds of times, sometimes in harmless fashion, often not. Trump howls about political foes who “HATE our country.” There are “haters and losers,” “Trump haters,” CNN pundits who “hate” him, and a single “Hate Crime” that riles Trump up. 

(Until this moment, the only hate crime Trump had ever tweeted about was the case of Jussie Smollett, who faked an attack on himself – and claimed the attackers were men in red MAGA hats.) 

 

“The inherent worth and dignity of every human life.” 

“Since Columbine,” Trump continues with his White House recitation, we have “watched, with rising horror, and dread, as one mass shooting has followed another, over and over again, decade after decade.” 

“We can and will stop this evil contagion,” he adds, but says it must be done in “a true bipartisan manner.” 

In perhaps the most ironic passage of all, Trump looks at the teleprompter and intones: “Cultural change is hard. But each of us can choose to build a culture that celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every human life.” In what sounds like an aside, diverging from the script, he adds, with what seems to be a brief touch of sincere emotion, “That’s what we have to do.”

 

The president talks for ten minutes. It’s hard not to notice he avoids the main point. “We must reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals,” make sure they get treatment, but face “involuntary confinement” if required. He talks about regulating “violent video games.” He seems to believe all mass murderers are “mentally disturbed,” but says he wants to add the death penalty in such cases. There’s no evidence a deranged killer would care. The problem Trump doesn’t dare address is the problem itself. Both shooters, as is almost always the case where mass murder occurs, were armed with military-style weaponry. And – more generally – the problem is that the country is awash with three hundred million guns. 

Instead, Trump hits a key right-wing talking point in his speech. We don’t need gun control. “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun,” he insists. 

His task nearly complete, Trump wraps up the speech he has no choice but to give. “If we are able to pass great legislation after all of these years, we will ensure that those who were attacked will not have died in vain.” He offers blessings to the memory of the people who died in El Paso. Then: “May God bless the memory of those who died in Toledo. May God protect them.” 

It’s a bizarre slip of the tongue, but Trump doesn’t correct himself. Moments later, he concludes his performance. He exits the room, as if making his escape, without taking a question from the press.

 

* 

THE DAY DOES NOT END, however, before several Republicans make colossal asses of themselves. 

Once again, we hear them argue that banning assault-style rifles won’t help because killers can still use knives. It’s the same line they trot out every time a mass shooting occurs. Killers can use cars, too. 

Oh, fuck it. Why not just argue that they can use nine irons, two-by-fours, and frozen turkey legs as clubs? 

(Next, they’d howl: “Liberals want to take away your drumsticks!”)

 

Ohio state Rep. Candice Keller, the biggest fool of all, places blame for gun violence right where it “belongs.” 

In a Facebook post she writes, “After every mass shooting, the liberals start the blame game. Why not place the blame where it belongs?” She kicks off her list: “The breakdown of the traditional American family (thank you, transgender, homosexual marriage, and drag queen advocates)...” 

It’s an idiotic response. And to be fair, the Ohio Republican Party chairwoman calls on Rep. Keller to resign.

 

* 

LEST WE FORGET, there are and always have been Republicans and conservatives who stand for principles any decent human can respect. Nebraska state Sen. John S. McCollister, a lifelong Republican, issues a series of searing tweets: 

The Republican Party is enabling white supremacy in our country. As a lifelong Republican, it pains me to say this, but it’s the truth.

 

I of course am not suggesting that all Republicans are white supremacists nor am I saying that the average Republican is even racist.

 

What I am saying though is that the Republican Party is COMPLICIT to obvious racist and immoral activity inside our party.

 

We have a Republican president who continually stokes racist fears in his base. He calls certain countries “sh*tholes,” tells women of color to “go back” to where they came from and lies more than he tells the truth.

 

We have Republican senators and representatives who look the other way and say nothing for fear that it will negatively affect their elections. No more. When the history books are written, I refuse to be someone who said nothing...

 

We all like to cite Abraham Lincoln’s Republican lineage when it is politically expedient but NOW is the time to ACT like Lincoln and take a stand.

 

With, that, he posts this picture and calls it a day.

 

 

 

Within hours, the chairman of the Nebraska GOP drums McCollister out of the Republican Party. 

And so it goes.

August 6. 2019: A Killer Name-Checks Trump, and White Supremacists are Inspired

 

8/6/19: In the wake of a trio of deadly shootings in California, Texas and Ohio, debate swirls around what to do and whom to blame.

 

____________________ 

The Christchurch killer name-checked the President of the United States, calling him “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

____________________

 

 

In a front-page editorial the New York Post (a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch) calls for a ban on “weapons of war.” The editors direct their argument to the President of the United States. 

God save us all, sir. People all across the nation are scared; many feel like the country is spinning out of control. They’re looking to their leaders for more than prayers.

 

America is terrified.

 

President Trump, you are positioned to assuage that fear. On gun control, you are a pragmatic centrist, someone who knows there is a vast majority of Americans who are not to the extreme left or right on this issue. They just want the killings to stop.

 

Yes, we know the president regularly praises the Second Amendment and received the National Rifle Association’s support in the 2016 race.

 

But the Second Amendment leaves ample room for regulating gun rights [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted], just as every other constitutional right has its limits.

 

…Come up with answers. Now. Beginning with the return of an assault weapons ban.

 

Meanwhile, the president is preparing to visit Dayton and El Paso on Wednesday. Many residents of the Texas city, where 85 percent of the population is Hispanic, don’t want him to show his mug.

 

Critics on the left are quick to mock his response to the slaughter, delivered the day before. “Teleprompter Trump,” they admit, sounds like a president. Trump, in the raw, sounds like a white supremacist, but one who can’t bring himself to come out of the closet and admit his proclivities. 

New details emerge. We learn that the El Paso killer praised the Christchurch, New Zealand murderer, who killed 51 Muslims at prayer in March. Like links in a diabolical chain, the Christchurch killer name-checked Trump, calling him “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Words matter, and Trump has vilified Muslims and dark-skinned people again and again.

 

* 

“He needs to realize the lethality of his rhetoric.” 

WHAT ELSE has happened since the triple mass killings? In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine tried to talk to a Dayton crowd and was shouted down. “Do something! Do something!” the angry throng demanded. 

Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican who represents the city in Congress, made an abrupt about face and called for a ban on military-style weapons and large-capacity magazines. This change was influenced in part by the fact his daughter was across the street at the very moment the Dayton killer opened fire – and by the knowledge that the murderer managed to unleash at least 41 rounds in under a minute. Turner, who had previously earned “A” ratings from the N.R.A., because of opposition to a ban on assault-style rifles, explained his change of heart: 

This weekend, a shooter wearing body armor opened fire in downtown Dayton with a weapon he had modified to be able to hold 100 rounds of ammunition. Dayton Police ran towards the shooter and neutralized him in less than thirty seconds, saving countless lives. In those few seconds, the shooter was able to murder nine people, injure at least 27, and deeply impact the entire community. If the police had not been present and able to instantly respond, the casualties would have been astronomical.

 

President Obama – who has been reluctant to criticize the current occupant of the White House (who, by contrast, has missed no opportunity to criticize him) – issues a rare public statement. Without mentioning Trump by name, he takes our current leader to task for his fearmongering.

 We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred and normalizes racist sentiments; leaders who demonize those who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people.

 

It has no place in our politics and our public life.

 

And it’s time for the overwhelming majority of Americans of goodwill, of every race and faith and political party, to say as much – clearly and unequivocally.

 

Frank Keating, the former Republican governor of Oklahoma also faults Trump. Keating knows white supremacist extremism from bloody experience. He was governor in 1995, when Timothy McVey bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. That bombing left 168 Americans dead. The toll included 19 children, at a daycare center on the bottom floor of the building. Another 680 men, women and children were injured in the blast. 

Now, Keating warned that the president must learn how to choose his words. “He needs to realize the lethality of his rhetoric. The truth is the president is the secular pope and he needs to be a moral leader as well as a government leader, and to say that this must not occur again – exclamation mark.” 

The student newspaper at Oklahoma University, where Keating is regent, seeks him out for further comment. Keating makes it clear he sees no reason for ordinary citizens to own assault-style weapons: 

“We simply can’t have this again. When I was growing up, and I believe largely when my children were growing up, we didn’t have this,” Keating said. “The contempt for human life, the dismissal of an individual’s right to be left alone, and the use of race, sex and nationality as an excuse for killing.”

 

Easy access to “war weapons” also enabled the attacks, Keating said, adding that the shooters had no previous criminal records and were able to legally purchase the weapons they used in the attacks.

 

“Why are people who are not fighting wars allowed to buy war weapons,” Keating said. “You can’t buy a flamethrower, you can’t buy a bazooka, why should you be able to buy an AR-15?”

 

Keating tells student reporters he owns several guns and uses them for recreation. He supports the Second Amendment. “This isn’t the (Second) Amendment, to say that I can arm myself with every weapon of modern warfare,” Keating adds. “That’s ridiculous in an urban, civilized society.

 

* 

White supremacists love Trump.

 SO, HOW DID TRUMP spend his time before heading off to Dayton and El Paso. He went to work on Twitter. In one tone-deaf tweet he decided it would be a brilliant stratagem to bring the country together by attacking Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat running for president, based on his name and poll numbers.

Low poll numbers! Low poll numbers, in Trump’s mind, are more hideous than torn, bleeding bodies.

Beto (phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage) O’Rourke, who is embarrassed by my last visit to the Great State of Texas, where I trounced him [Trump has previously claimed he had much bigger crowds for a rally] and is now even more embarrassed by polling at 1% in the Democrat Primary, should respect the victims & law enforcement - & be quiet!

 

It was the essence of Trump, petty and whiny, and anti-First Amendment rights for critics, all in a single tweet.

  

Speaking of essence, Monday we had the essence of Fox News. Fox News – where if President Trump pushed a baby off the top of a ten-story building, Sean Hannity would claim, against all logic and visible evidence, that his crime paled in comparison with Hillary’s missing emails. 

This time the job of denying reality fell to Tucker Carlson. As if the shooting in El Paso had never happened, Carlson weighed in on the topic of the day. White supremacist violence? Not a problem! 

Below we provide our assessment: 

CARLSON: It’s not the job of this show to defend the president and everything he says [Carlson claimed Monday night]. 

BLOGGER: That is his job. It’s the job description of Tucker and Sean, Ainsley and Brian K., of Lou Dobbs, the perpetually angry host of the Fox Business Channel, and four of every five panelists on “The Five.”

 

CARLSON: Some things we are not going to defend [Tucker continued]. But in point of fact, [Trump] never endorsed white supremacy or came close to endorsing white supremacy. That’s just a lie. But he condemned it anyway. Their response, “he didn’t really mean it.” 

BLOGGER: Who thinks Trump might be endorsing white supremacy, besides Democrats running for president? White supremacists! After the president attacked four Democratic congresswomen of color, Andrew Anglin, who runs Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website responded: 

Man, President Trump’s Twitter account has been pure fire lately. This might be the funniest thing he’s ever tweeted. This is the kind of WHITE NATIONALISM we elected him for. And we’re obviously seeing it only because there’s another election coming up. But I’ll tell you, even knowing that, it still feels so good.

 

CARLSON: If you were to assemble a list, a hierarchy of concerns of problems this country faces, where would white supremacy be on the list? 

Right up there with Russia probably. 

BLOGGER: Maybe on Fox News, where Tucker is contractually bound to defend everything Trump does and says, up to and including urinating in the punch at a White House press reception, Russia is not a problem. 

We who consult other sources, know that the following Trump campaign aides and family members have admitted suspicious and/or illegal contacts with Russians during the 2016 election cycle: General Michael T. Flynn (now a convicted felon), Carter Page (not charged), Michael Cohen (felon), Felix Sater (a felon before joining Team Trump), George Nader (also a felon before joining the team; currently indicted anew), George Papadopoulos (felon), Roger Stone (under indictment at this time), Michael Caputo (not charged), Donald J. Trump Jr. (not charged), Jared Kushner (not charged), Paul Manafort (felon) and Rick Gates (felon).

 

CARLSON: [White supremacy?] It’s actually not a real problem in America. The combined membership of every white supremacist organization in this country would be able to fit inside a college football stadium. 

BLOGGER: Um…that’s a lot of people…and just one guy in one hypothetical seat went out and gunned down 46 actual human beings.

 

CARLSON: This is a country where the average person is getting poorer, where the suicide rate is spiking – “white supremacy, that’s the problem” – this is a hoax. Just like the Russia hoax, it’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power. 

BLOGGER: If you’ve never noticed, there are a lot of “hoaxes” in the land of the right-wing nuts. Trump himself has called climate change a hoax and said President Obama’s American citizenship was a hoax.  

The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax. 

The Parkland, Florida student protesters were “actors” and their outrage at seeing teachers and friends murdered was a hoax. 

The Trump supporter who sent pipe bombs to more than a dozen leading Democrats and Trump critics…that was a hoax, too. The Democrats set that one up! They mailed bombs to themselves!!! 

 

“A Donald Trump superfan.” 

Of course, lawyers for Cesar Sayoc, the man who sent the bombs, demolished that claim this same week. Their client, they argued in a plea for mercy before sentencing was handed down, was “a Donald Trump superfan.” 

“In this darkness,” the lawyers wrote in a sentencing memo, “Mr. Sayoc found light in Donald J. Trump.”

 

Mr. Sayoc listened to Mr. Trump’s self-help books and championed him on social media. He watched Fox News religiously while working out at the gym.

 

“Because of Mr. Sayoc’s mental illness, this type of [dangerous] rhetoric deeply affected him because he so greatly admired the president,” one of Mr. Sayoc’s lawyers, Ian Marcus Amelkin, said in court. “It is impossible, I believe, to separate the political climate and his mental illness.”

 

Last fall, Mr. Sayoc’s lawyers wrote, the “slow-boil of Mr. Sayoc’s political obsessions and delusional beliefs” led him to build and send his 16 packages to 13 intended victims he considered to be Mr. Trump’s enemies. 

 

In other words, Trump’s unhinged rhetoric had further unhinged the unhinged.