Now we know why Donald Trump responded the way he did to the Annapolis newspaper shooting

| 12:12 pm EDT July 2, 2018
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Earlier this week someone shot up the office of a newspaper in Maryland, murdering several journalists in the process. In the context of Donald Trump’s ongoing calls for violence against his political detractors in general, and his scapegoating of the media in particular, it was clear that Trump was at least partly to blame for creating the atmosphere for the shooting; the only question was how much or little of the blame he deserved. His uncharacteristically tepid response seemed to give something away, and now there’s confirmation of it.

Even as Trump allies like Sean Hannity inexplicably tried to blame the shooting on Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Donald Trump merely tweeted a video of himself nervously tripping over a generic prepared statement. Our assessment at the time: “Even he knows that he’s overplayed his hand with his attacks on the media, and that the general public sees this shooting as endemic of the atmosphere he’s created.”

Sure enough, the Daily Beast is now reporting that Donald Trump did in fact complain to his advisers that he knew the public would blame him for the shooting. This suggests that, for all his profound and worsening psychological and moral failings, Trump is still lucid enough to understand how normal people view these kinds of things.

We’ve since learned that the alleged shooter had sued the newspaper in question for libel six years ago. But he never felt motivated to carry out violence against the newspaper’s staff until now. His Twitter account also confirms that he supported Donald Trump during the election, which strongly suggests that he was buying into Trump’s demonization of the media. So yeah, this shooting was at least indirectly Trump’s fault. Even if he doesn’t understand why it’s his fault, he does understand why mainstream Americans blame him.