“It is not implausible to believe that Trump’s years of sulfurous rhetoric — never mind his Monday-morning reading, seemingly for the first time, of words the teleprompter told him to recite — can provoke behaviors from susceptible individuals, such as the alleged El Paso shooter,” Will wrote. “If so, those who marked ballots for Trump — we have had quite enough exculpatory sociology about the material deprivations and status anxieties of the white working class — should have second or perhaps first thoughts. His Republican groupies, meanwhile, are complicit.”
Will, who left the GOP after Trump’s takeover of the party, connected the attack in El Paso directly to Trump’s own rhetoric. Specifically, he opened the piece by describing Trump’s May 8 rally in Florida when the president cheerfully took up the suggestion from a fan who said we should “shoot” immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
View the complete August 7 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.