A day after the El Paso shooting, there was another shooting in Dayton Ohio, killing nine.
The El Paso gunman’s manifesto echoed language Trump and other Republicans have used to talk about immigration: “The suspect wrote that his views “predate Trump,” as if anticipating the political debate that would follow the blood bath. But if Mr. Trump did not originally inspire the gunman, he has brought into the mainstream polarizing ideas and people once consigned to the fringes of American society.”
The National Review’s editorial: “the patterns on display over the last few years have revealed that we are contending here not with another “lone wolf,” but with the fruit of a murderous and resurgent ideology — white supremacy — that deserves to be treated by the authorities in the same manner as has been the threat posed by militant Islam.”
George Will: “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. 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.”
Trump delivered scripted remarks on the shootings from the White House. He denounced hatred in general terms. Trump visited shooting victims in Ohio and Texas, where he attacked Democrats and bragged about crowd sizes: “That was some crowd,” Trump says of his event. “We had twice the number outside. And then you had this crazy Beto. Beto had like 400 people in a parking lot, and they said his crowd was wonderful.” None of the shooting victims still being treated in the hospital agreed to meet with Trump.
Here is a good piece on the orphaned baby being photographed with a smiling Trump giving a thumb’s up: “A really exceptional work of obscenity, like a really exceptional work of beauty, exceeds the ability of its viewers to fathom what they just saw. Did that just happen? But … how? What sorcery created it? Words don’t arrive, and the stammering gives way to silence.”
Epstein was found dead in his cell on Saturday morning. Later that day Trump retweeted a conspiracy theory that the Clinton’s were behind the death.
Which prompted David Frum to write: “But it shouldn’t be forgotten, either, in the onrush of events. The certainty that Trump will descend ever deeper into sub-basements of “new lows” after this new low should not numb us to its newness and lowness. Neither the practical impediments to impeachment and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment process, nor the foibles and failings of the candidates running to replace him, efface the fact that this presidency shames and disgraces the office every minute of every hour of every day. And even when it ends, however it ends, the shame will stain it still.”
Nadler is saying he is currently doing an impeachment inquiry, and his committee may recommend articles of impeachment by the end of the year.
Immigration
A man who was born in a refugee camp and had been in America since he was 6 months old in 1979 was recently deported to Iraq, where he died two months later. According to ICE: “was ordered removed from the United States in May 2018 after at least 20 criminal convictions over the previous two decades, including assault with a weapon, domestic violence and home invasion. While awaiting deportation, he was released in December with a G.P.S. tracker, but he cut it off, the agency said. Local police arrested him in April on a larceny charge, and he was finally deported on June 2.”
On the same day Trump traveled to El Paso, there was a massive ICE raid in Mississippi. Over 600 immigrants were arrested. Many of their children were left without immediate caregivers.
Trade War
New York Times: “The trade war between the United States and China entered a more dangerous phase on Monday, as Beijing allowed its currency to weaken, Chinese enterprises stopped making new purchases of American farm goods and President Trump’s Treasury Department formally labeled China a currency manipulator.”
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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.1%