The Week USA – August 31, 2019

“A really exceptional work of obscenity, like
a really exceptional work of beauty, exceeds
the ability of its viewers to fathom what
they just saw,” said Graeme Wood in The
Atlantic.com. And the photo of a grinning
President Trump flashing a thumbs-up while
standing next to a baby orphaned in the
El Paso mass shooting is truly, exceptionally
obscene. Two-month-old Paul Anchondo,
whose parents both died shielding him from
a white nativist hunting Mexicans with a
military-style rifle, was actually brought
back to the hospital Trump was visit-
ing because five wounded adult survivors
refused to meet with our anti-immigrant
president. So, the White House conscripted
a powerless infant as a prop in a photo op. Words fail. “Ghoul-
ish and surreal might serve,” said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com.
The child’s parents are dead because a white nationalist “spout-
ing Trumpist talking points about ‘foreign invaders’” took that
racist rhetoric seriously. If Trump were a normal man, let alone
a normal president, he would have been somber when meeting
that orphaned child, and moved to compassion and critical self-
reflection. But not our reality-TV president. All he cares about is
getting attention and credit, so he turned that fraught encounter
into another opportunity to preen and mug for the camera. “It
took a tiny baby to reveal how small Donald Trump really is.”

Enough with the “phony outrage,” said David Catron in Spectator
.org. The baby’s uncle Tito—who is in the photo with his arm
around the president—is a self-described Trump supporter who
brought the baby to the hospital voluntarily. Liberals went “ber-
serk” because the photo undercuts their narrative that Trump is “a
Mexican-hating racist” who caused the El Paso massacre with his
tough talk against illegal immigration. “If Trump is responsible for
El Paso, then Democrats are responsible for Dayton,” said Marc
Thiessen in The Washington Post. The Dayton shooter labeled
himself a “leftist,” voiced support for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and
echoed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rhetoric about how immi-
grant detention centers are “concentration camps.” Of course, it
would be ridiculous to blame these Democrats “for the actions of
a madman.” The same is true of Trump.

That comparison is “idiotic,” said Bret Stephens in The New York
Times. The Dayton shooter had been obsessed with mass shoot-

ings for years, and his victims included six

black people and his own sister. They “did

not fit any political or ethnic profile.” The

El Paso shooter’s mostly Hispanic victims,

however, “were the objects of his expressly

stated political rage.” The Right’s attempt

to equate the Dayton and El Paso murder-

ers “is a transparently self-serving effort to

absolve the president of moral responsibil-

ity.” Like the shooter, Trump uses the word

“invasion” to describe immigration, invok-

ing the word in more than 2,000 campaign

ads. When Trump asked, “How do you

stop these people?” at a rally in Florida

earlier this year, someone in the crowd

shouted “Shoot them!” The mob cheered

and Trump grinned. We’re told to take Trump seriously, but not

literally. The El Paso shooter, it seems, “didn’t get that memo.”

Some of Trump’s immigration rhetoric is “crude and inflamma-

tory,” said Rich Lowry in the New York Post, and he shouldn’t

use the word “invasion.” But he’s never said anything to “justify

indiscriminately shooting people.” The president’s actual immigra-

tion position is that we should protect the southern border with

a wall while reforming asylum rules. That’s in “a different moral

universe” from the shooter’s belief in murdering immigrants. But

the Left wants to use the overlap between the shooter’s words and

Trump’s to invalidate his entire immigration agenda.

“We will likely never know how much the El Paso shooter was

influenced by rhetoric like Trump’s,” said Amelia Thomson-

DeVeaux in FiveThirtyEight.com. But we do know that Latinos

“have become more insecure and fearful about their place in

the country.” A recent Pew survey found that more than half of

Hispanics say their lives have become more difficult since Trump

was elected. As an immigrant from Brazil, said Fernanda Santos

in The New York Times, “I felt safe in America”—until recently.

That has changed under Trump, even though I am a natural-

ized citizen. Shortly after the election, a man screamed at me to

“Speak English!” while I was on the phone outside a coffee shop.

I started carrying my passport card in my wallet just in case. But

I know that a piece of paper can’t truly protect me, or my mixed-

race daughter, because we have brown skin, which now makes us

“invaders.” For the first time since I arrived here 21 years ago, I

don’t feel like a proud American immigrant. I feel “like a target.”

16 NEWS Talking points

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Thumbs up: The Trumps pose with the baby.

Tr ump: The impact of his immigration rhetoric

QSince a white supremacist killed nine

people at an African-American church in

Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015, mass

shootings (when four or more people

are killed) have occurred every 47 days

on average. Before the 1999 Columbine

High School shootings, the pace was

roughly once every six months.

The Washington Post

QWayne LaPierre, the chief execu-

tive of the National Rifle Associa-

tion, tried unsuccessfully to get the

nonprofit organization to buy him

a $6 million lakefront mansion last year.

LaPierre and his wife said they needed the

10,000-square-foot, French-style estate in

a gated community near Dallas for secu-

rity reasons, after the backlash over the

Parkland, Fla., school shootings.

The Wall Street Journal

QGymnast Simone Biles,

22, became the first

woman to successfully

complete a triple-twisting

double somersault in

competition en route to

winning her record-tying sixth U.S. cham-

pionship. Only two men have pulled off

the move in competition.

NBCNews.com

QThe homeownership rate among

African-Americans was 40.6 percent

in June, which is 33 points lower than

the white homeownership rate. Black

homeownership is at its lowest rate since

1960, largely because people lost so many

homes to the predatory lending policies

that led to the 2008 financial collapse.

Bloomberg.com

Noted