President Donald Trump inadvertently made a damning admission about himself in his latest tirade against the far-right commentators who have turned against the MAGA movement over the Iran war, Greg Sargent wrote for The New Republic on Friday.
Specifically, Trump took aim at Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist webcaster who has become increasingly outspoken against the president after years of loyal support.
What caught Sargent’s eye was Trump’s characterization that “Bankrupt Alex Jones…says some of the dumbest things, and lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, ridiculously claiming it was a hoax.”
“Wait, so Trump thinks it was ‘horrendous’ that Jones claimed the Sandy Hook massacre was a ‘hoax’?” he wrote. “That’s interesting. Because after Jones first pushed his vile conspiracy theories about the 2012 massacre — which took the lives of 20 children and 6 educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut — some in Newtown publicly called on then-president Trump in 2017 to condemn Jones’s conspiracy theorizing about it. And they say it never happened. It turns out that there’s a whole backstory here involving Trump, Jones, and Newtown that goes back many years. Now that Trump has reopened the topic, it deserves a recapping.”
In fact, he noted, at the time, Trump simply put out a vague statement condemning “hate” and refused to condemn Jones specifically. “We were hoping the president-elect would denounce Alex Jones for the damage he caused to families who did lose somebody and other families impacted by the tragedy,” said former Newtown councilmember Eric Paradis, the father of a shooting survivor. “He never did. We were disappointed in the lack of response.”
Ultimately, Sargent wrote, Trump’s ability to suddenly find a conscience on this, only after Jones criticized him, speaks volumes about his character.
“The perversity here runs deep,” he wrote. “In describing Trump as unfit for the presidency over his threat to wipe out Iranian civilization, Jones actually got something right, as did Trump’s other critics. But rather than simply climb down from this monumentally deranged vow to commit massive war crimes and murder tens of millions, Trump is able to perceive criticism of this only as an intolerable display of personal disloyalty to him. Incredibly, that’s what it took to get Trump to denounce Jones and, by extension, fully recognize, well over a decade too late, the horrors that the people of Newtown endured.”
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