The national media are never going to like anything about President Trump, so it doesn’t matter that they’re panning his pitch-perfect remarks Monday at the White House on the two mass shootings that took place over the weekend.
While they’re busy searching their hearts for yet more reasons to hate Trump, they’re missing the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates make complete asses of themselves as they try to out-grieve and out-outrage one another.
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, struggling with 3% national support, nearly came apart at the seams on Monday when a reporter asked an innocuous question about how Trump should respond to the shooting in El Paso. “I don’t know,” O’Rourke replied, “like, members of the press — what the f–k?!”
That grand display of magnanimity earned him a front-page Washington Post story on Tuesday praising his “raw, emotional” reaction. The sticky-sweet piece, authored by Jenna Johnson, went on to note that the candidate had “quickly called his wife to make sure that she and their children were safe” when he heard about the shooting. (By what can only be a twist of fate, it turned out that O’Rourke’s multimillionaire wife was not at Walmart at the time of the massacre.)
National tragedies that take place during a presidential campaign often allow a candidate to put forth a solution so that such an event might never happen again. For example, after the deadly Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016, which was perpetuated by a son of Afghan immigrants, President Trump called it a consequence of our “dysfunctional immigration system, which does not permit us to know who we let into our country, and it does not permit us to protect our citizens properly.”
Regardless of what anyone might feel about immigration, it was nonetheless a call to action to address a specific issue, almost like Trump had a clue about how to solve difficult problems or something.
After the El Paso Walmart shooting, however, O’Rourke’s most lasting contribution will so far be, “I don’t know. Like, members of the press — what the f–k?!” If it doesn’t get him a bump in the polls, it at least got him more love from Jenna Johnson, who was previously in a swoon over what she described as O’Rourke’s “potent compassion.”
In an interview Monday on CNN, former Vice President Joe Biden reverted back to fearmongering about white supremacists, “veins bulging, just coming out from under the rocks, carrying torches” and apparently ready to hang a bunch of minorities. This is a myth that Democrats and liberals in the media tell to scare unassuming people. The truth, as described at great length in my forthcoming book Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People, is that interracial homicide is exceedingly rare. Furthermore, white supremacy-related episodes of violence pale in comparison to those committed by Islamic extremists.
On record, there are more supposed incidents of violence committed by white supremacists in America than there are committed by Muslim extremists, but while the average body count of a white supremacy-related incident is one, for a Muslim extremist-related incident, it’s five. Frequently, the one life claimed by a white supremacist will have been his own family member or, if worst comes to worst, another white person.
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, meanwhile, should be included in psychology textbooks as a case study in cognitive dissonance. Back in March, Booker repeated the lie that Trump has “failed … to condemn Nazis or even to talk about white supremacy as a problem in this country.” But this week on CNN, after Trump said that he once again condemned racism, bigotry, and white supremacy, Booker rejected it because Trump didn’t directly take responsibility for the shooting.
The poor Democrats are doing everything they can to get noticed. And yet, after a five-minute interview, every cable channel wants to go back to Trump. Admittedly, Trump hate is very cheap to come by in the news media. But if we paid attention long enough, we would see how embarrassing the Democrats are getting in light of a national tragedy.
