On Monday morning, President Trump put part of the blame for the horrific mass shootings in Texas and Ohio over the weekend on one of his favorite targets: the news media.
Trump’s accusation is not completely off base, if examined in a certain light. Fox News, the right-wing outlet of choice for the the president, has consistently peddled the kind of racist theories that the suspected El Paso gunman expounded on in a manifesto he posted minutes before killing 20 people at a Walmart on Saturday. But that’s probably not the segment of the press Trump had in mind with his tweet.
Trump’s own incendiary rhetoric about immigration and the press was echoed by the suspected killer, and as Twitter users pointed out, the wording of the president’s Monday tweet was not dissimilar to passages in it.
In another tweet Monday morning, Trump implied that he was interested in strengthening the country’s flimsy background-check laws — a longtime goal of congressional Democrats — but only if that legislation were paired with sure-to-be-onerous immigration restrictions, a condition that would make any negotiation impossible.
On Sunday, Trump told reporters that his administration had already done “a lot” on guns — presumably referring to the administration’s banning of bump stocks — but that “perhaps” more needed to be done.
