Trump rises high above his critics in the Scalise shooting

Many of the most outspoken critics, on the other hand, have behaved shamefully, which has served only to underscore just how well the president has responded to this entire episode.

Immediately following news last Wednesday morning that a shooting incident in Alexandria, Va., had left many wounded, including Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., and lobbyist Matt Mika, both of whom were put in critical condition, the president wasted no time giving the nation a somber update.

“We may have our differences, but we do well, in times like these, to remember that everyone who serves in our nation’s capital is here because, above all, they love our country,” the commander in chief said from the White House.

Trump later paid the wounded Scalise a visit in the hospital. The president then gave another public update on the congressman’s health.

The tone of Trump’s remarks on this event has been pitch-perfect. He has been calm, respectful and apolitical. In other words, it is exactly what is needed, and expected, in emergencies like this.

In contrast, some of Trump’s critics have behaved deplorably, many of them practically rushing to use the event to score cheap political points.

Let’s start first with the Washington Post, which used the shooting as an occasion to publish two – two! – editorials calling for stricter gun control laws. Never mind that the shooter broke several laws already in place in order to carry out his twisted mission.

Then there’s House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who argued both that heated rhetoric is to blame for the attack, and that Republicans are responsible for the current state of the nation’s political discourse.

“It didn’t use to be this way. Somewhere in the 90s, Republicans decided on a politics of personal destruction as they went after the Clintons, and that is the provenance of it, and that is what has continued,” she said.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the late Judge Robert Bork say, “hello.”

Elsewhere, media commentators and activists decided amid updates that Scalise was in critical condition that now would be a good time to attack him and other GOP lawmakers over their voting records.

MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid, for example, argued that the congressman’s respective positions on same-sex marriage and the Affordable Care Act were fair game, saying now is as good a time as any to go after him for his past.

“Rep. #Scalise was shot by a white man with a violent background, and saved by a black lesbian police officer, and yet…,” her show’s official Twitter feed said this weekend.

She followed-up personally on her program, saying, “There’s a whole country out there and a lot of people, at least in my Twitter timeline, and it’s a delicate thing, because everybody is wishing the congressman well and hoping that he recovers, but Steve Scalise has a history that we’ve all been forced to sort of ignore on race.”

She added, “Because he is in jeopardy and everybody is pulling for him, are we required in a moral sense to put that aside in the moment?”

Political activist and left-wing darling George Takei echoed Reid, saying in a widely shared, but since-deleted, tweet, “The officer who saved bigoted, homophobic Rep. Steve Scalise during baseball practice was a black lesbian.”

They aren’t alone in these broken and simple-minded criticisms.

Fusion published an odious blog post titled, “Bigoted Homophobe Steve Scalise’s Life Was Saved by a Queer Black Woman.”

The millennial blog also used the shooting to take shots at Vice President Mike Pence, declaring in one headline, “Mike Pence, who would have hated the Orlando victims in life, tries to use them in death.”

Never mind the fact that the supposedly bigoted Scalise works day-to-day with African-Americans and members of the LGBT community on his security detail, as rightly noted by Heat Street’s Stephen Miller.

Lastly, there’s now-former CBS anchorman Scott Pelley, who opined in his outgoing monologue last Thursday that both sides are to blame for the botched assassination attempt.

“It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress, yesterday, was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted. Too many leaders, and political commentators, who set an example for us to follow, have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric which, it should be no surprise, has led to violence,” he said.

If nothing else, suggesting that Scalise is in some way partly responsible for getting shot deserves points for creativity.

Throughout this whole ordeal, the president has shown that he can rise to the occasion (provided he doesn’t lash out suddenly and contradict this entire column). His pettier, more “thoughtful” critics, not so much.