WASHINGTON - A pair of mass shootings in Texas and Ohio over Saturday and Sunday have dragged two of the most divisive issues in American politics -- the rise of violent white supremacism and gun control -- to the forefront of public conversation as politicians across the ideological spectrum are preparing for what is expected to be an extremely contentious 2020 election campaign.
The two shootings, which left 29 people dead and at least 53 more wounded, combine to create a clear political crisis for the Trump administration and its allies in Congress.
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The first shooting, in El Paso, Texas, occurred early Saturday and was carried out by a 21-year-old white man who is believed to have published an explicitly racist manifesto that echoed U.S. President Donald Trump’s frequent charge that Hispanic immigrants from Mexico and Central America constitute an “invasion” of the United States. After he surrendered, he told police that he had set out to kill as many “Mexicans” as he could. He murdered 20 people and wounded another 27.
The second, in Dayton, Ohio, was committed after 1 a.m. Sunday by a 24-year-old white man toting a legally-purchased military-style semi-automatic rifle equipped with two 100-round drum magazines that helped him kill or injure three dozen people in less than 30 seconds. President Trump and Republican lawmakers have been adamantly resistant to the kind of regulations promoted by Democrats that would make it impossible for a private citizen to amass such firepower.
The murders in the Texas border city of El Paso come at a time when violence related to white supremacist ideologies is demonstrably on the rise. In July, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray told Congress that the “majority of the domestic terrorism cases we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”
In 2018, domestic terrorists killed at least 50 people in the U.S., according to the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, which tracks such murders. Every one of the killers had an identifiable connection to a right-wing political movement, the center said.
In what is believed to be his manifesto, the El Paso killer made it clear that his antipathy toward Hispanics pre-dated Trump’s rise to power in the 2016 election, but the similarity of some of his language to the president’s rhetoric in his campaign rallies was unmistakable.
Like Trump, the killer described immigrants as “invaders.” At recent political events, Trump has called for minority members of Congress to “go back” to the places they came from. In his manifesto, the killer said that “patriotic Americans” should give immigrants the “right incentive” to return to their home countries.
Most notably, perhaps, is that while railing against illegal immigrants during a re-election rally in May, the president asked the crowd “How do you stop these people?” When one supporter shouted “Shoot them!” Trump laughed as the crowd roared its approval.
On Sunday, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney made multiple TV appearances to defend the president from a chorus of accusations -- most notably from Democratic presidential candidates -- that Trump’s rhetoric fans the flames of violent white supremacism.
“This was a sick person. The person in Dayton was a sick person,” Mulvaney said in an appearance on ABC News. “No politician is to blame for that. The person who was responsible here are the people who pulled the trigger. We need to figure out how to kind of create less of those kinds of people as a society and not trying to figure out who gets blamed going into the next election.”
Mulvaney was then pressed on Trump’s seeming reluctance to identify white supremacism as a significant concern. After a gunman spouting white supremacist rhetoric murdered dozens of Muslims in New Zealand earlier this year, Trump was asked if he views the ideology as a global threat. He responded: “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”
“I don't think it's at all fair to sit here and say that he doesn't think that white nationalism is bad for the nation,” Mulvaney said. “These are sick people. You cannot be a white supremacist and be normal in the head.”
But Democrats, particularly presidential candidates, were having none of it.