Paul Waldman is worried that the legacy of President Trump in the world of white supremacists will last for years:
In the wake of two horrific mass shootings over the weekend, particularly the one in El Paso where 20 people were allegedly murdered by a man who apparently left an online message echoing some of the themes of President Trump’s rhetoric, many have been putting blame at least partially at the president’s feet. We can debate how justified that is, but for the moment I want to shift focus just a little. There’s another vital question we need to ask: not whether Trump is inspiring murderers, but whether he is now, and will in the future, disappoint them in ways that could lead to more deadly violence. …
For many of them, that’s enough. To hear their sentiments echoed from the highest office in the land provides enormous satisfaction, even if the results don’t match the rhetoric.
But others, the less stable and the more heavily armed, will not be assuaged. They may well see in Trump’s presidency nothing but failure. After all, didn’t he promise a return to when people like them were on top? The Muslims would be banned, the minorities would be shown their place, a “big beautiful wall” would be built from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico — and Mexico would pay for it.
Waldman may be right, in fact I fear is right, that there will be more mass shootings as the white supremacists become more and more disappointed that America didn’t rally around their whiteness and proclaim itself a white homeland.
But, in the long, tragic, and painful end, every shooting traceable to white supremacy discredits white supremacy. It demonstrates the immaturity of every single member of the white supremacist movement, their inability to intellectually persuade anyone capable of a moment of logical thought, of introspection, of simple decency.
It’s emblematic of the sheer laziness that is the inevitable traveling companion of white supremacism, that reluctance to admit that competing with anyone who is not white might result in their failure. It’s so much easier to point at their skin, earned without the sweat of the brow, than to work hard, or study hard. To pull out a gun, shoot others, and perhaps die in the attempt is so much easier than to cope with the problems of peaceful co-existence, those problems that might leave their desperate egos burdened with the knowledge that, their skin-God shown to be empty, they cannot compete.
Fear and laziness.
So, for the press, it’s quite one thing to label some barbaric murderer a white supremacist; it’s quite another to, once again, destroy the position, a shield for nothing more than power-seeking. That’s what needs to happen. Some people need to see the same arguments over and over before they comprehend it.
And some never will comprehend it. For them, gun control may be the closest we can come to an answer in a free country.
