The most recent of the totally predictable mass murders that occur every few months in this country was a perfect storm combining many of the racial, religious and social hatreds that have inflamed Republicans this election year.
Think about it. The mass shooting took place in a gay Orlando dance club on Latino Night and was committed by a Muslim who pledged allegiance to foreign terrorists.
That’s why soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was so delighted. He barely knew which vile strain of hatred to tap into first to promote his candidacy.
No surprise, though, that Trump’s reaction managed to combine three of his favorite topics—hatred of immigrants, hatred of Muslims and love of himself.
“Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism,” Trump tweeted. National Journal columnist Ron Fournier described Trump as taking “a victory lap in blood.”
I’d prefer to think Trump was simply lying as he usually does. As low an opinion as many of us have of Trump supporters, it’s difficult to believe very many human beings actually reacted to the mass killing of 49 people and wounding dozens of others by sending their “congrats” to Donald Trump.
Trump immediately tried to use the Orlando massacre to bolster his proposals to ban followers of Islam from entering the U.S. and to round up and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, possibly including some of the grieving families.
Since Latinos were targeted in the murderous, racial hate crime, Trump could just as easily blame a bigoted Republican presidential candidate who racially stereotypes immigrants from Mexico as rapists and murderers. Nah. That would be wrong.
Well, then, since the shootings appeared to be rooted in hatred of gays, Trump could have blamed Republican politicians in Wisconsin and 10 other states planning to sue the federal government to defend their right to discriminate against transgender people using bathrooms.
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No, in Trump’s mind it would be completely unfair to blame Republicans for any of the irrational hatred they promote to inflame their voters.
Trump really thought he should be basking in “congrats” for drawing such a clear connection between the worst mass murder in America’s long history of mass murders and his own public opposition to immigrants and the Islamic religion.
Never mind that the shooter was described by those who knew him as not a very devout Muslim and that he was born in New York just like Trump.
“The bottom line,” Trump declared, “is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here” from Afghanistan.
Trump Blames Muslims
But it wasn’t just the killer’s immigrant parents who were to blame for the Orlando bloodbath, Trump said. All American Muslims were to blame because Muslim communities know those in their midst who are about to go on murderous rampages. Yet they do nothing to stop them or alert authorities.
Republicans often make such charges against minority communities. That’s why I always feel fortunate to be a white person. I’ve never had to answer for my own personal involvement in one of the grisliest serial murders in American history.
I was living in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991, when another white member of my community, Jeffrey Dahmer, raped, murdered and cannibalized 17 men and boys. Dahmer worked at a chocolate factory just a couple of blocks from my newspaper office.
But white people are never considered responsible for horrible crimes committed by members of their race even when they live in the same community. African Americans and other people of color always are.
Trump’s major contribution to political hatred this year has been to extend the same kind of broad-brush prejudice that is usually reserved for racial minorities to an entire world religion of 1.6 billion people.
House Speaker Paul Ryan continues to denounce the candidate he’s endorsed for president to preserve his own future candidacy after Trump’s ugly campaign comes crashing down in November.
No one is even surprised any more by the twisted, bigoted nonsense spewing out of Trump’s mouth. Trump entered presidential politics as a “birther” accusing Barack Obama of conspiring from the time he was born to cover up his foreign Muslim birth so he could grow up to become an evil Manchurian Muslim president.
Now Trump is using Orlando to push that crazed theory to the next lunatic level by openly suggesting President Obama might secretly be supporting terrorist attacks by radical Muslims in America.
“There’s something going on,” Trump warned ominously.
Boy, there sure is. And Trump happens to be right that one of America’s gravest threats is tied directly to its open borders.
The bottom line is that the only reason the Republican Party is about to nominate an offensive, hateful menace to democracy as its presidential candidate is because we allowed Trump’s mother to emigrate here from Scotland in 1930.
