Donald, Ivanka and Kellyanne Are Spinning as Fast as They Can

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Barack Obama got under Donald Trump’s skin.

On Monday afternoon, the former president tweeted a statement in the wake of last weekend’s mass murders in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas. “Until all of us stand up and insist on holding public officials accountable for changing our gun laws, these tragedies will keep happening,” Obama wrote, without identifying any officials by name. “We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments.”

Trump responded early the next morning. He quoted a host from the TV program “Fox & Friends” who pointed out that George W. Bush never criticized his White House successor when mass shootings occurred during Obama’s presidency. Trump quoted another host who said it all sounded like politics to her and suggested that Obama’s statement was part of a broader effort to “push that racist narrative” about him.

The president’s optimal response might have been to acknowledge Obama’s observations and say he shared them. But given that Trump has previously cast doubt on where Obama was born; said he was deficient (“the most ignorant president in our history”); has routinely slagged him as inept (“a disaster”); and once claimed that he bugged Trump Tower, harmonizing with Obama about the roots of a national tragedy was unlikely. Next best response? Ignore what Obama wrote. Unhelpful response? What Trump tweeted.

All of this continues to matter because Trump embarks Wednesday for Dayton and El Paso to offer solace and support to the communities there. He comes to those visits with baggage. A lifelong racist who has presided over incendiary and sometimes violent, anti-immigrant political rallies, he had spent the last few weeks before the shootings attacking Democrats of color. That prompted widespread criticism that his language and actions opened the door to tragedies like the El Paso shooting, which appears to have intentionally targeted Mexican immigrants. 

As the Washington Post noted recently, it’s hard to predict which president will show up to heal the nation’s wounds at such moments — Teleprompter Trump (the unifier reading prepared remarks) or Twitter Trump (the race-baiting divider uncorking bile). We can always expect Trump to revert to the latter because that’s who he is, even if he temporarily manages to conform to his teleprompted self. And that’s the risk here: Trump’s visits today could cause more problems than they solve. (At close to midnight on Tuesday, Trump let his displeasure with a certain El Paso resident — “Beto (phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage) O’Rourke” — be known.)

Trump is uniquely incapable of doing what needs to be done, even apart from aggressively spearheading an overhaul of the nation’s inadequate gun laws. He hadn’t found it in himself to apologize for any of the feelings he’d wounded, or the lives he’d endangered, before the shootings, and he’s unlikely to begin expressing remorse or authentically changing course now. All of that is consistent, unfortunately, with how his closest advisers have been spinning things since the shootings.

Ivanka Trump, an enduring sounding board for her father, tweeted on Sunday that she hoped for divine intervention in the tragedies. “May God hold the victims, their families and the El Paso and Dayton communities tightly in his loving arms.” While it might be more practical in the near term for the White House to show some love, Ivanka has regularly invoked religious devotion on her Twitter feed after tragic events, and her response Sunday was consistent with that. (Her father, who has never been particularly religious or a churchgoer but has a loyal Evangelical political base, also sent his prayers to the El Paso and Dayton victims.) Although Ivanka has been notably silent in public about her father’s bigotry, she managed to get ahead of him over the weekend in identifying one of the culprits behind the shootings: “White supremacy, like all other forms of terrorism, is an evil that must be destroyed,” she advised on Twitter.

By Tuesday morning, some of Ivanka’s good intentions seemed to have turned political, however. She highlighted shootings in Chicago and helpfully reminded her Twitter followers that “we mustn’t become numb to the violence faced by inner city communities every day.” That message, which wrapped Chicago into the El Paso-Dayton narrative, upset Chicago’s mayor but resided quite comfortably with her father’s recent effort to cast America’s cities as hellholes run by Democrats.

Kellyanne Conway, a frequent Trump surrogate, has also been running interference for her boss. On Tuesday, she let it be known that she’s “hopping mad” at what she claims is the media’s lack of interest in the ideology of the Dayton shooter —  who reportedly said he supported Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren —  claiming that liberal bias compelled reporters to focus on the El Paso shooter—  whose language in an online manifesto reflected some of Trump’s own phrasings.

What separates the two murderers, of course, is that no evidence has been found yet indicating the Dayton shooter’s actions were racially or politically motivated, which is why federal authorities haven’t labeled it as an act of domestic terrorism. The El Paso shooter, on the other hand, was a member of an online anti-immigrant hate group. He also said he went on his rampage, in part, because of his fears of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” which is one reason why authorities do consider that massacre a terrorist act.

Another important factor separates how the media has looked at both shootings. Sanders and Warren haven’t been espousing violence, bigotry and racism as part of an anti-immigrant crusade. They didn’t provide the kind of fodder a murderer might digest before grabbing a weapon. Trump, however, most certainly has done exactly that. And Trump has rightly drawn special attention because of what he has said and, quite obviously, because he’s the president. Moreover, Trump is under the microscope because he’s played a pivotal role in setting the events in motion that he’s trying to corral by visiting Dayton and El Paso today. He has some work to do.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Daniel Niemi at dniemi1@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Timothy L. O’Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. He has been an editor and writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine. His books include “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”

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