Donald Trump’s body count just keeps rising
On Thursday, white supremacist propaganda site Breitbart published a new interview with Donald Trump. In that interview, Trump semi-coherently threatened to have bikers carry out unspecified violence against the American people if they don’t reelect him or don’t support him. Half a day later, a white supremacist murdered forty-nine Muslims in New Zealand, while specifically crediting Donald Trump.
Did Donald Trump’s latest violent threat about bikers cause the New Zealand shooting to happen? No. But it’s clear that Trump’s overall ongoing violent and racist rhetoric did at least partially contribute to motivating this monstrous shooter to do what he did. Trump’s bodycount, which already includes Heather Heyer as well as the children who have died in his immigrant concentration camps, just climbed even higher.
Trump’s response to the shooting was to tweet a late-night link to Breitbart last night, which he’s since deleted. Then at the White House on Friday, Trump told the television cameras that the shooting is one of the reasons he wants to build a wall to keep immigrants out.
The nerve of this guy. The shooter was a white racist, and he was targeting minority immigrants, and yet Trump still tried to spin it to fit his narrative of minority immigrants targeting white people. But then we expect this kind of toxic scumbaggery from Donald Trump. He’s literally the worst person – or at least the singularly most negatively impactful person – on the planet. What came next was flabbergasting, however.
When various people accurately pointed out that Donald Trump’s violent racist rhetoric played some role in the New Zealand shooting, Trump’s supporters began insisting that Trump has never made any sort of violent threat, and that he’s never said anything racist. This was one day after Trump explicitly threatened to turn bikers loose on the American people, and a few hours after Trump pushed his racist wall agenda yet again.
It’s a jarring reminder that Donald Trump’s remaining supporters are so far gone psychologically, they can’t even process what’s going on. Trump makes a violent threat, and the next day they’re insisting it never happened. This has all the hallmarks of cult behavior. It’s just that the Trump cult consists of the lowest of people to begin with. These are dangerously deranged people to begin with; Trump’s cult-like leadership has merely enabled them to take things even further into the breach.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report