Consoler and Enabler-in-Chief
By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO−After the shooting at Chabad of Poway by a white supremacist armed with an AR-15 rifle, President Trump commented: “My deepest sympathies go to the families who were affected. Looks like a hate crime. Hard to believe!”
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When asked the day before if he still believed there were “very fine people” among the Alt-right demonstrators in Charlottesville, Trump replied, “If you look at what I said you will see I answered that question perfectly. I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general.”
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President Trump did not issue a condemnation of man who deliberately drove his car into a group of Sikhs earlier this week because he erroneously thought they were Muslims.
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The Senior Vice-President of the ADL testified to Congress this month: White supremacists in the United States have experienced a resurgence in the past three years. There is also a clear corollary to the rise in polarizing and hateful rhetoric on the part of candidates and elected leaders. White supremacists were responsible for more than ¾ of all domestic extremist murders in 2018.”
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Following the mass shooting of Muslims in New Zealand last month, Trump disputed that that white nationalist terrorism was on the rise in the world by stating, “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. If you look at what happened in New Zealand, perhaps that’s the case. I don’t know enough about it yet. But it’s certainly a terrible thing.”
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In his 2015 book Crippled America, Trump asserted, “Opponents of gun rights often use a lot of scary descriptive phrases when proposing legislative action against various types of weapons. Ban ‘assault weapons’ they say, or ‘military-style weapons,’ or ‘high-capacity magazines. Those all do sound a little ominous, until you understand what they are actually talking about are common, popular semiautomatic rifles and standard magazines that are owned and used by tens of millions of Americans.”
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Conclusion: The only thing that can stop a white supremacist with a semi-automatic rifle is a president who takes the danger posed by white nationalism seriously and lobbies the Republican majority in the Senate to limit the sale of such lethal weapons of war.
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Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted via lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com.