Trump says stop standing for the slaughter of innocent people

The Manchester bomb is of course a gift to Trump: now he can yell that he was right right right about keeping out all the Mooslims except the ones from Saudi Arabia and other not at all Islamist places like that.

“This is what I’ve spent these last few days talking about in our trip overseas,” Mr. Trump said after a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. “Our society can have no tolerance for this continuation of bloodshed. We cannot stand a moment longer for the slaughter of innocent people.”

As if everyone else were standing for it, and only Trump thinks we should make it stop. The problem is that it’s not easy to make it stop, and just saying we won’t stand for it isn’t the magic solution.

Yaakov Peri, a former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, said on Israeli television Tuesday morning that “the tragic attack in Manchester plays favorably for Trump, who in Saudi Arabia said that we will fight terror together.”

But the attack also poses some risks for Mr. Trump, whose responses to fast-moving events — sometimes dashed off in a tweet with a hashtag and an exclamation point — can sound off-key. In his first comments Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump used a playground epithet to describe people like the assailant in the bombing.

“I will call them from now on losers, because that’s what they are,” Mr. Trump said after the meeting with Mr. Abbas. “They’re losers. And we’ll have more of them. But they’re losers. Just remember that.”

I flinch. I hate the word “losers” and I hate it all the more coming from Trump, because to him it means men who don’t grab women by the pussy.

But.

But all the same I kind of know what he’s getting at and this one time I even kind of agree with him. I think disdain is the right reaction, or part of the right reaction. They want to be feared and hated; they don’t want to be seen as pathetic. The reality is it doesn’t take courage or genius or greatness to set off a bomb in a crowded place. It’s all too easy. Any schmuck can do that.

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