Donald Trump has received a lot of flak over the last few days, all of it warranted, for encouraging violence against immigrants and people of color. “Other countries” are allowed to shoot migrants, he lamented to supporters back in May as his reelection campaign flooded the internet with ads about an “invasion” on the southern border. “Other countries stand [at the border] with machine guns, ready to fire,” he told Sean Hannity in March, noting that “it’s a very effective way of doing” things. So when a mass shooting in El Paso occurred over the weekend, perpetrated by a guy who wrote a manifesto about an immigrant “invasion,” it wasn’t too hard to connect the large orange dots, or to figure out where someone might have gotten the idea that it’s okay to kill Latinos.
According to Trump, though, not only is his rhetoric not to blame for the recent violence and a spike in hate crimes, but it’s actually unifying country.
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