Let’s give somebody an award
The Guardian is following Trump’s awful road trip.
Predictably, Trump talked about irrelevancies.
The president met with first responders and some of the shooting victims at a local hospital. [Senator Sherrod] Brown said Trump expressed a desire to give an award to the police officers who helped end the shooting quickly.
“I said, Mr. President, respectfully, the most important thing you can do for these police officers is take assault weapons off the street,” Brown said.
Trump was generally vague about committing to any concrete action on gun control. Brown said.
It’s so Trump. Ignore the reality, ignore the incalculable anguish on all sides of him, instead prattle about giving an award to someone.
He’s on the way to El Paso now. Maybe he’ll treat the people of El Paso to a rant about people “flooding” across the border to “infest” the country.
Ahem, it’s pronounced ‘toh-lee-doe’.
What’s “funny” (in that, it would be funny if it didn’t have such tragic consequences) is when Trump’s ignorance of politics plays out on the public stage in real time. Like, after a mass shooting, he’ll toss out something like tougher background checks or restrictions on ammunition purchases, because what little “common sense” he has tells him that these things are reasonable compromises or bones he can throw out. Then someone takes him aside and explains that, oh no, the NRA won’t go for that shit, and he has to walk it back.
He did something similar in that open meeting with Congress, where Nancy Pelosi proposed something so seemingly bland and reasonable that Trump jumped at it so he could declare the meeting a success, only to have his fellow Republicans clue him in that GOP don’t do reasonable.
Or during the campaign, when he was asked whether he favored prison sentences for women who had abortions. He made the mistake of trying to apply logic to the Republican position, and figured “well, if abortion is murder, surely we have to punish the women who hire doctors to commit murder,” and said yes. Then he was told that no, actually, that shit doesn’t poll well, so anti-choicers have mostly all agreed to pretend that women are dumb innocents who get bamboozled into abortion by Svengali-like doctors.
It’s almost cute.
But think of the downstream economic benefits: the jobs created for medal-makers, and their assistants. Etc.
Also in the armaments industries as everyone tools up for the next event, and where the response to each shooting can only be increased gun sales: otherwise the NRA would be against guns, and the whole arms business would be closing down of its own accord.
2 Styles
2 Styles
I’m not sure that he walks anything back. If anything, he walks insincere platitudes forward for a moment, then abandons them at the roadside and continues on his original odious course with barely a break in stride.
The great thing about giving an award is, if course, that HE will be the center of attention.