Former Rep. Beto O'Rourkewrote on Twitter: "This president, who helped create the hatred that made Saturday's tragedy possible, should not come to El Paso. We do not need more division. We need to heal. He has no place here."
O’Rourke, at this point a mere nuisance candidate in the presidential race, set a standard for the nation in demonstrating that partisan hackery can transcend any national tragedy. No matter how many are dead, it’s never so many that he cannot stand atop their bodies and hurl down insults at the president he will not be running against in the 2020 general election.
But the real problem here is not O’Rourke’s desperate effort to turn this tragedy into a reboot of his flagging presidential candidacy. The real problem is that O’Rourke is far from the only Democrat currently wishing and praying for a sitting president to do badly by his nation and to harm America as a whole.
This was manifest on Tuesday, when Democrats and liberals staged a full-fledged online freak-out over the objectively factually accurateNew York Timesheadline about Trump’s speech. The original headline merely noted Trump's message on Monday: that Americans should respond to what happened in El Paso by uniting against racism. Yet, Democrats weren’t even happy when theTimes’ editors, offering no real explanation, replaced the headline with one that subtly editorialized against Trump.
It is good and healthy for the nation that a president should say what Trump said, especially a president previously accused of going soft on white nationalists. Love Trump or hate him,everyone who loves America must want to hear him condemn white supremacism and nationalism unequivocally, for all to hear. That is the best possible thing for him to say to the nation right now, that all people of all political persuasions can unite around this message.
There are surely Democratic voters of good will in this country. But the loudest voices on today's Left and in today’s Democratic Party hate Trump far more than they hate racism, and they are showing it now. The moment Trump tried to do something inarguably constructive, they stopped caring about racism’s harmful effects on the body politic and acted primarily from concern that this will hamper their ability to call Trump a racist.
They decided it’s a better use of their time and energy to frame half of their fellow citizens as Klansmen than it is to rally alongside them behind the common enemy of a violent racist ideology.
For anyone who cares about the common good, this nation desperately needed to hear Trump say what he said Monday.That’s exactly why we called upon him to say it. People needed to see Trump stand up and condemn white supremacism and white nationalism without holding back. And, as we argued, they would benefit from seeing and hearing him do it again and again and again, and doing it in El Paso, coming together with politicians with whom he strongly disagrees.
Like Bill Maher, who said earlier this summer thathe's rooting for a national recessionso that Trump will lose, O’Rourke and many of Trump's political adversaries masquerading as journalists seem too obsessed with bringing down Trump's presidency to want what's good for their country in the meantime.
Shame on all of them, and on all of the others who want the nation to be upset and fragmented and divided by tragedy, just so that they can sooner get the political outcome they are hoping for.