Former President Barack Obama put President Donald Trump to shame on Saturday by delivering the response to the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that Americans needed to hear from a real president.
A gunman murdered 11 people inside the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in yet another another hate crime and killing spree under Trump’s watch. The mass shooting follows the execution of two black people inside a Kroger earlier this week and the attempted assassination of Trump’s political opponents and critics by the MAGAbomber, including Obama.
True to his usual form, Trump initially responded to the mass shooting by evading a question about America’s weak gun laws and the fact that AR-15 style weapons, which is what the gunman used, are so easily accessible. Instead, Trump blamed the victims.
“Well, again, this has little to do with it if you take a look,” Trump said of gun laws. “If they had protection inside the results would have been far better. This is a dispute that will always exist I suspect. If they had some kind of protection inside the temple, maybe it could have been a very much different situation. They didn’t. And he was able to do things that unfortunately he shouldn’t have been able to do.”
Trump then went on to blame the synagogue for not hiring an armed guard rather than answer a question about his support from the NRA.
“This is a case where they had an armed guard inside, they might have been able to stop him immediately,” Trump claimed. “This had been a case where if there were an armed guard inside the temple, they would have been able to stop them. Maybe there would have been nobody killed except for him frankly.”
Of course, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, also had an armed guard and that didn’t work to stop a gunman from murdering multiple kids.
In a tweet that he probably did not write himself, Trump would feign sympathy and support for the victims all while pretending to condemn anti-Semitism despite calling himself a “nationalist” at a rally this week and defending neo-Nazis in the wake of events in Charlottesville, Virginia last year.
All of America is in mourning over the mass murder of Jewish Americans at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. We pray for those who perished and their loved ones, and our hearts go out to the brave police officers who sustained serious injuries…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2018
Trump even called for unity to “conquer hate” despite sowing division and hatred with his speeches and tweets for the last two years:
…This evil Anti-Semitic attack is an assault on humanity. It will take all of us working together to extract the poison of Anti-Semitism from our world. We must unite to conquer hate.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2018
Thankfully, America still has President Obama to rely on for words of comfort and a call to action to prevent future tragedies:
We grieve for the Americans murdered in Pittsburgh. All of us have to fight the rise of anti-Semitism and hateful rhetoric against those who look, love, or pray differently. And we have to stop making it so easy for those who want to harm the innocent to get their hands on a gun.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 27, 2018
Unlike Trump, Obama understands the real problem is our pathetic gun laws. And rather than blame the victims like Trump did, Obama immediately expressed sympathy and called out hate.
This is what a response to tragedy looks like from a real president. Trump, like everything else he says and does, is fake.
Featured Image: Wikimedia
