There has been bipartisan disapproval of the public statements Donald Trump made in the first hours after the Orlando terror attack. As officials scrambled to make sense of events leading up to the shooting at the Pulse nightclub, Trump tweeted that the attack confirmed his position on fighting terror and proved that the nation needs to adopt his policies.
“Not really about you today,” tweeted former Democratic National Committee spokesman Mo Elleithee in response.
“His tweets have been sophomoric at best,” said Ryan Williams, a former spokesman for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, in a conversation Sunday night. “On a day of a national tragedy, when people are in mourning, it is completely irresponsible for the Republican nominee to be tweeting out self-congratulatory statements on how great he has been on terrorism.”
A torrent of similar criticism followed. But over the last several months Trump showed strength in the polls when some terror attacks — Paris, San Bernardino — happened during the Republican primaries. Of course, that was with GOP voters in GOP contests, in which roughly two-thirds of voters in key-state exit polls approved of Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban foreign Muslims from entering the United States. The question now is what effect a horrendous act of terror will have during the course of a general election campaign.
In a brief conversation Monday morning, Newt Gingrich, who has been supportive (although sometimes critical) of Trump’s campaign, said the critics are paying too much attention to Trump’s style while losing sight of the substance of his critique of the ineffectiveness of administration anti-terror efforts.
“I think when over 100 Americans are shot and 49 are dead, to worry about tone is just a sign of how nutty our elites are,” Gingrich said.
“Trump was right,” Gingrich continued. “Obama and Clinton were wrong. Trump has been warning again and again that this has been getting more dangerous. Obama kept reassuring us everything was under control. We’ve now had San Bernardino. We’ve had Chattanooga, we’ve had Boston, we’ve had Fort Hood, and now we’ve had Orlando. And how many Americans have to die for Hillary and Barack to tell us the truth? Neither one of them can bring themselves to tell us the truth. So they have this fantasy. They lied to us about Benghazi. The statement of the president yesterday was totally misleading. And I think that’s why, frankly, despite his weaknesses and despite the fact that he is just learning the trade now, Trump shows enormous resilience, because telling the truth clumsily in the end beats lying in a sophisticated way.”
This afternoon, Trump had originally planned to deliver what he called “a major speech” on the various scandals and questionable activities of Hillary and Bill Clinton. “The Clintons have turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves,” Trump said last week, on the night he won the final contests of the Republican primary season. Now, with the carnage in Orlando, plans have changed; the Clinton speech will have to wait. Instead, Trump will deliver what the campaign calls “a major speech to further address [the Orlando] terrorist attack, immigration, and national security.” And he will almost surely add new fuel to the terror debate, both in the general election campaign and inside the Republican Party.
