Trump would rather blame Democrats than grapple with his “invasion” rhetoric

President Donald Trump is using a false equivalency to dismiss concerns over his rhetoric after the El Paso, Texas, mass shooting that left 22 dead last Saturday — one that was motivated by the anti-immigrant hysteria he regularly foments.

During a Q&A session with reporters ahead of his controversial trip to El Paso and Dayton, Ohio — the site of another mass shooting that left nine dead the same weekend — Trump pointed to the Dayton shooter as evidence that Democrats also share responsibility for violence.

Asked by a reporter what he says to “critics” who “believe your rhetoric is emboldening white nationalists,” Trump dismissed them as motivated by politics and said, “if you look at Dayton, that was a person that supported, I guess you would say, Bernie Sanders I understood, antifa I understood, Elizabeth Warren I understood — had nothing to do with President Trump.”

It’s not just Trump who is pushing this talking point. During a Fox News interview on Tuesday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said she’s “hopping mad” because there’s “scant coverage” of the Dayton shooter having a Twitter feed that was “supportive of antifa, supportive of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders.”

This talking point, however, overlooks some key considerations. While it’s true that the Dayton shooter did apparently have a Twitter account that identified him as a “leftist” and that posted tweets signaling support for Warren and Sanders, there’s no indication that his political beliefs motivated him to kill his sister and eight others outside a bar in Dayton. Authorities haven’t said much so far about his motives, though perhaps more pertinent than his Twitter account is the fact that he reportedly “had an obsession with violence and mass shootings and had expressed a desire to commit a mass shooting.”

On the other hand, the El Paso gunman’s manifesto makes clear he was inspired to open fire at a Walmart along the US-Mexico border by the idea that immigrants are “invading” the country — the same dehumanizing language Trump has used countless times to talk about migrants and asylum seekers crossing the southern border.

One of Trump’s ugliest rants about immigrants took place in February in El Paso, where in an almost hypnotic fashion he brought up undocumented immigrants and said, “Murders, murders, murders. Killings, murders!” His fans responded by breaking out in “build the wall!” chants.

The manifesto the El Paso shooter left behind begins by describing his attack as “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Other passages of his screed read as though they were lifted directly from Trump’s tweets, such as his comment that Democrats “intend to use open borders” to make Texas “a Democrat stronghold.”

The Dayton shooter left no manifesto. But even assuming he supported Sanders and Warren, neither of them have said or tweeted anything that could be interpreted as a call to violence. Though they do critique millionaires, billionaires, and corporations, they do not suggest that they are murderous invaders who are out to physically harm people.

Trump, however, mused about the possibility of shooting undocumented immigrants at a rally as recently as in May. But instead of grappling with the implications of his rhetoric, he’s using the Dayton shooter’s apparent left-wing sympathies to deflect from it — even though there’s no comparison between the language of “invasion” and what Democrats are saying on the campaign trail and elsewhere.

Later during his Q&A on Wednesday morning, Trump was asked directly if he has regrets about using the same language as the El Paso shooter. He indicated he does not.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the Trump campaign doesn’t plan to stop using the word “invasion” in reference to immigrants in its Facebook campaign ads. Fox News hosts have indicated they’ll continue to talk about immigrant “invasions” as well.

The El Paso shooter wasn’t even the first who appeared to take cues from Trump’s “invasion” rhetoric — the gunman who killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last October cited it as one of his motivation, as did the far-right gunman who killed 51 Muslims in two mosques in New Zealand in March.

If all this bloodshed isn’t enough to prompt Trump to do some self-reflection, then it’s likely nothing will. And it goes beyond his rhetoric — Trump seems equally uninterested in gun control laws aimed at preventing shooters from obtaining weapons that allow them to shoot 14 people in 30 seconds.

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