Even for a president
Holed up in a gilded bunker at his Mar-a-Lago golf club and resort in Florida, not quite 40 miles from the site of the country’s latest school shooting, America’s narcissist-in-chief took to Twitter and made the slaughter three days earlier of 14 students and three staff members about — what else? — himself.
If only the FBI hadn’t been wasting so much time investigating his campaign’s connections with Russia during the 2016 election, he suggested, those 17 innocent people might still be alive.
As we’ve learned so many times before, it’s a mistake to believe that Donald Trump can’t stoop any lower. And it’s a mistake, as well, to think that any of this is going to stick to him. If insulting POWs didn’t stick, if bragging about sexual assault didn’t stick, if conducting an adulterous affair with a porn star, paying hush money to cover it up, ignoring the threat of foreign intrusions into the nation’s electoral process, failing to ensure those on his staff with access to national security information have the appropriate clearances, personally profiting from his public office, and lying about, well, everything, didn’t stick, this latest abomination won’t, either.
Here’s another mistake: Waiting for Congress to do something.
“This is inexplicable,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, R-NRA, said after Wednesday’s shooting. No, senator, it’s not. What is inexplicable is why — after Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after Las Vegas, after Orlando, after the Emanuel AME Church, after Fort Hood, after any one of this country’s recent mass shootings — you and hundreds of other state and federal lawmakers continue to take blood money from the National Rifle Association. (The NRA and other affiliated organizations gave some $50 million to Trump and other Republicans during the last election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Rubio was among the biggest beneficiaries, receiving more than $3 million.)
So, if we can’t turn to the White House or the Capitol for leadership on this issue, then where?
You might want to check the cafeteria. Or maybe the study hall. There you’ll see the beginnings of a movement as America’s students mobilize to fill the leadership void left by feckless adults.
Traumatized by seeing their friends gunned down in their classrooms, fed up with the empty “thoughts and prayers” offered by gun-lobby apologists, and empowered by the reach of social media, students have already conducted a “lie-in” on a street just outside the White House (Trump wasn’t there, of course), created an organization called Teens For Gun Reform (more than 3,000 followers already on Facebook), and are planning a demonstration, called March For Our Lives, scheduled for next month in Washington, D.C. Many other groups are planning similar demonstrations across the country, including one on Thursday in Montpelier.
“The people in the government who are voted into power are lying to us,” said 18-year-old Emma Gonzalez, a Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School senior, at a rally after the shooting at her school. “And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call BS.”
As the Florida Sun Sentinel reported, Gonzalez was far from alone in her outspokenness.
Following Trump’s tweet denouncing the FBI, fellow student Morgan Williams shot back, denouncing Trump for his “audacity” in trying to make the shooting about Russia. “You can keep all of your fake and meaningless ‘thoughts and prayers,’ ” the teenager told the leader of the free world.
“At the end of the day this isn’t about the red and the blue, the GOP and the Democrats. This is about adults and kids,” fellow student Cameron Kasky told Fox News. “And in the next election we’re saying if you accept money from the NRA there’s a badge of shame on you. Because you’re enabling things like this to happen.”
Three gun violence prevention bills are now before the Vermont Legislature: S.6, which would require background checks for the transfer of firearms; S.221, relating to “extreme risk protection orders”; and H.422, which would allow the confiscation of dangerous weapons from those cited for domestic assault. At Thursday’s rally in Montpelier, Vermont middle and high school students will urge the passage of those measures.
And we note that, in New Hampshire, students have a field for action in their own right in demanding the repeal of the law that prevents school officials from banning guns in school buildings and on school grounds, and replacement of it with a law that would allow local and state police to enforce an already-existing federal gun ban.
At last report, Trump was planning to host a “listening session” today with students and teachers at an unspecified school. We doubt much will come of this, there being scant evidence to date that this president has any interest in listening to anyone about anything.
But we hope the kids give him an earful.