A lot of observers are focusing on what Donald Trump said and did before the El Paso massacre to fan the flames of racism that the shooter appeared to embrace.
But on Thursday night, Rachel Maddow pointed out that Trump’s behavior after the mass killing in the border city will go down as one of the darkest moments in American history.
“The administration responding with the biggest ever anti-immigrant raid to the first-ever anti-Latino, anti-immigrant gun massacre in this country, this will be history,” the MSNBC host said. “This will go down in history as what our government did.”
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Rachel Maddow calls Trump’s response to the El Paso terrorist attack a dark moment in American history. #ctl #p2 #maddow pic.twitter.com/qXPRd65fYW
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) August 9, 2019
Maddow said:
That is how this will look in history. I don’t know that anything said by this administration or spoken by this president will ultimately make it into this generation’s almanac of what happened in our country in our time. But the government and the president’s campaign responding like this to this terrorist attack against Latinos and immigrants, this will make the history books. The administration responding with the biggest ever anti-immigrant raid to the first-ever anti-Latino, anti-immigrant gun massacre in this country, this will be history. This will go down in history as what our government did. And, of course, whatever we are all doing right now as citizens in our own lives will also be our own personal history of what it was that we were doing at this time in our country’s life, when our country was doing this. Absolutely astonishing.
Trump made an already-dark moment even darker
The shooting itself – a man motived by hatred driving hours to target Hispanics in a shopping center – is a dark moment in American history.
A good president would try to calm and unite the nation after such a tragedy. At the very least a decent leader would take accountability for any of his own rhetoric that may have inspired such violence and vow to do better going forward.
But in Donald Trump, that’s not the leader the country got. In fact, we didn’t get a leader at all.
Instead, Americans watched a small man drop into two grieving cities and film campaign advertisements, attack his political opponents and brag about his crowd sizes.
And, as Maddow pointed out, while Trump was deepening this country’s divides during his visits to El Paso and Dayton, his administration was targeting more immigrants in a massive raid in Mississippi.
There have been a lot of moments during this presidency that felt like rock bottom. But Donald Trump’s behavior this week shows that he’s incapable of finding that bottom.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
