In the aftermath of the incident at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where an armed gunman attempted to breach the event, Donald Trump spent an amazing amount of time focused on one of his top priorities: The president invested a new round of time and energy into lobbying in support of the ballroom project he’s been obsessing over for months.
The day after the shooting, Trump sat down with CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, for an interview that aired on Sunday night’s “60 Minutes,” in which he continued down the same path — “I’m building a safe ballroom,” he boasted — before the conversation shifted to another one of the Republican’s domestic priorities.
Referring to the alleged shooter, the president argued, “Well, see, the reason you have people like that is you have people doing No Kings.” In other words, as Trump sees it, Americans gathering peacefully in communities nationwide to denounce his abuses necessarily creates conditions for political violence.
That’s plainly absurd, but more importantly, it reflects Trump’s apparent belief that the proper response to an incident such as the one the world saw on Saturday night is to take steps to stifle dissent — again.
As part of the same exchange, the president quickly made the transition from condemning No Kings protests to condemning the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization Trump’s Justice Department began prosecuting last week, which the president seized on as part of a weird attempt to justify nullifying the results of his 2020 election defeat.
It led to this harangue that Trump delivered during the “60 Minutes” interview:
I see these No Kings, which are funded just like the Southern Law, you saw all that? Southern Law is financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta stop the KKK.’ And yet they give, you know, hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that, like Charlottesville. Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law. That was a Southern Law deal too. And it was done to make me look bad, and it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election.
The meandering train of thought was impossible to follow, largely because it was incoherent. As part of an interview about a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Trump managed to leap from the gunman, to the No Kings rallies, to the Southern Poverty Law Center, to unnamed Democrats, to Charlottesville, to the “rigged election” that wasn’t rigged.
Those looking for logical reasoning in the comments were left wanting.
But as the interview continued, the unsubtle presidential message continued. When O’Donnell asked, for example, “Political violence has touched so many people in that room. Is there something that you as president can do? What can be done to change the trajectory….”
Before the anchor could finish the thought, Trump jumped in to argue, “I do think that the hate speech of the Democrats much more so is very dangerous. I really think it’s very dangerous for the country.”
The Republican best known for accusing his opponents of being “evil” and members of “the party of Satan,” went on to whine about Joe Biden and push a conspiracy theory about his Democratic predecessor.
Not quite 24 hours after the dangerous incident, in other words, when Trump wasn’t talking about his ballroom, he focused his attention on denouncing those who dare to criticize or disagree with him, as if they somehow bore responsibility for the developments.
House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that the president is “at his strongest in times of crisis and turmoil.” Given Trump’s actual post-crisis record, I’m left to assume the Louisiana Republican was referring to some other president.
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