Police say the alleged gunman used smoke grenades when entering the Capital Gazette before blasting his way into the newsroom, looking for his victims.
On Thursday, after five people were brutally gunned down in a newsroom in Annapolis, Md., President Trump was repeatedly pressed to comment on the bloodshed and to offer condolences to grieving family members. As he strode across the White House lawn, he said nothing.
This sets up a test going forward for Trump. Will he now refrain from heaping abuse and vitriol on reporters, and from whipping up his supporters into frenzies of rage at them? If the answer is what I expect it to be, this will also implicate one of our biggest debates right now — the one over "civility" and the appropriate ways of expressing political anger at a time when there is a great deal of it.
The gunman appears to have harbored a personal vendetta, and the point here is not that Trumpian rhetoric is to blame. It's also possible that Trump (who did issue a tweet) will speak adequately to the incident, reports Washington Post.
But at a minimum, it should also dissuade Trump from future attacks on the media, since he should feel an obligation to do all he can to ensure that this grisly horror is not a harbinger of more to come.
The "civility" debate turns on whether certain expressions of anti-Trump anger are justified, and if they are, whether they are nonetheless politically counterproductive.
Prior to departing Wisconsin, I was briefed on the shooting at Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Thank you to all of the First Responders who are currently on the scene.
Those expressions include the Red Hen's refusal to serve the White House press secretary; the public cursing of liberal entertainment personalities; and claims by progressives that Trump's policies (and his supporters) are racist.
Thomas Edsall argues that throwing around the term "racist" alienates a segment of white voters who aren't actually racist but are unhappy with current immigration levels and get driven back into Trump's arms by the slur.
And Ross Douthat, while sympathetic to the Red Hen owners, argues that such displays risk alienating moderates who might not think we're in the midst of a civic emergency, and urges more constructive civil disobedience.
I don't know how to determine whether these displays actually alienate voters in significant numbers. But even if they do, the question itself seems misdirected. That's because we cannot seriously debate the "civility" question without placing the role of Trump's deliberate provocations in causing all the anger front and center.
Trump's own advisers have explicitly said they see stirring up anger around immigration and race as a political strategy. Stephen Miller called this "constructive controversy — with the purpose of enlightenment." Stephen K. Bannon enthused that "our thing is to throw gasoline on the resistance."
Anne Arundel County Executive Steven Schuh holds Thursday's edition of the Capital Gazette. Photo / Getty Images
To Edsall's credit, he notes this, observing that Trump's race-baiting is designed to energize his base and lure liberals into using the "racist" slur, while urging liberals not to fall into that "trap."
But this badly understates the case. Out of a desire to solidify his hold on his base — that is, a shriveled white minority — Trump's racist provocations are also doing great civic damage to the country and hurting untold numbers of real people.
Trump's racism is doing enormous damage
Trump pardoned racist sheriff Joe Arpaio after being persuaded it was "a way of pleasing his political base" — but what message does that send to Latinos, given that Arpaio had perpetrated horrible abuses and civil rights violations on Latino immigrants?
When Trump refused to unambiguously condemn white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, he chose to stoke racial tensions further — tensions that Bannon flatly declared would help Trump politically — rather than carry out his institutional responsibility to speak as a unifying voice at a moment of searing national tension.
The family separation policy inflicted cruelty on untold numbers of children for the deliberate purpose of dissuading would-be border-crossers — including desperate refugees — in service of a white nationalist policy agenda. In intent and execution, this has nothing in common with any legitimately motivated or designed policy to reduce legal immigration.
But Trump, who also regularly dehumanizes undocumented immigrants in horribly ugly ways, reportedly claimed that "my people love it." We cannot place the real impetus behind these policies off limits for discussion.
Which brings us to Trump's attacks on journalists. Some reporters tweeted that we damn well better not hear Trump use the words "fake news" again. And we damn well better not hear any more abuse of reporters, either.
If Trump does resume these things, the message will be extremely clear: Trump will continue directing his supporters' rage at the real human beings who do this work, after having seen five of them gunned down, with little sense of any public obligation as possessor of the presidential bully pulpit to do all he can to avoid producing more horrors.
Trump is actively trying to divide the country in all kinds of ways. This is getting a lot of people angry. But that is Trump's goal. Even if the emotion at times strays out of control in counterproductive ways, let's get real: This is not the kind of public anger that can easily be managed or channeled, given the scale of the deliberate provocations that are producing it.
The "civility" conversation is way out of balance: Its focus needs to be squarely not on the perpetrators of the anger, or the victims of the provocations, but on the real cause-and-effect chain here — and on the terrible toll it is inflicting, one that could grow more horrifying.
