Donald Trump knows he’s overplayed his hand
After Congresswoman Maxine Waters encouraged mainstream Americans to stage peaceful protests against Donald Trump advisers who showed up in public places of business, Trump falsely and repeatedly accused Waters of having called for violence. Waters has been receiving death threats from Trump supporters as a result. On Thursday, someone shot up a newspaper office, murdering several journalists.
Donald Trump has spent the past couple years encouraging violence against peaceful protesters, and he’s also repeatedly scapegoated reporters, calling them the “enemy of the American people.” Trump’s rhetoric clearly played a role in the murder of these journalists; the only proper debate is how much or little of a role that he played. Nonetheless, his allies quickly tried to go on the offensive and spin this shooting to his advantage.
Trump’s most loyal ally in the media, Fox News host Sean Hannity, used his radio show on Friday to falsely blame Maxine Waters for the shooting. Trump’s online supporters quickly took to Twitter and repeated Trump’s false claim that Waters had called for violence, even while falsely claiming that the shooter was a liberal or a Democrat. In reality a Twitter account, which very much appears to belong to the shooting suspect, reveals that he was in fact a Trump supporter.
We were half expecting Donald Trump to wake up today and try to pin the shooting on Maxine Waters, after his base had laid the groundwork for it. Instead, Trump merely tweeted a video of himself tepidly reading a prepared statement about the shooting, defending the rights of journalists and vowing to keep them safe. Of course that’s a ridiculous premise, considering his ongoing rhetoric against journalists. What stands out here is that Trump didn’t even bother to try to spin the shooting in his favor. 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.
