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Grieving mom confronts 'toddler' Trump over Santa Fe school shooting

Trump was utterly clueless when addressing parents whose children were killed in the recent Santa Fe High School shooting.

By Eric Boehlert - June 01, 2018
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President Donald Trump speaks about the high school shooting in Texas from the East Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, May 18, 2018, during a Prison Reform Summit.

After bizarrely announcing he was heading to Texas on Thursday for “a little fun,” Trump met with families who lost loved ones during the recent gun massacre at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas.

The meeting did not go well.

Trump was confronted by Rhonda Hart, an Army veteran whose daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, was killed in the school massacre.

Vaughan was one of the 10 victims in the shooting, as an armed student opened fire in the hallways and an art classroom. Police say the shooter carried out the attack with a shotgun and pistol that belonged to his father.

Trump “kept calling him [the shooter] this wacky kid who was wearing a wacky trench coat,” said Hart. “I said, ‘[The shooter] might have been depressed, but he wasn’t wacky.’ But if that kid needed help, he needed to have proper access to it. “Meaning you shouldn’t repeal the Affordable Care Act and get them the help they need and take away the stigma of mental illness.”

She added, “Maybe if everyone had access to mental health care, we wouldn’t be in the situation.”

Vuaghn said Trump’s response to her was, “Uhhhh….”

Overall, she claimed talking to vacant Trump was like talking to a “toddler.”

Trump has done absolutely nothing about trying to confront the dangers of gun violence, especially at schools. The Santa Fe shooting was the 22nd this year on an American campus.

The deadly Texas event unfolded two weeks after Trump basked in the adulation of the NRA, as the radical gun group hosted its annual convention in Texas.

Trump also has a long history of being humanly incapable of comforting victims, especially victims of gun violence, as he runs interference for the NRA out of the White House.

After the February massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in February, Trump blamed teenagers for not stopping the shooter.

Hosting a strange, televised round-table discussion at the White House following the Parkland massacre, Trump engaged in NRA fantasies about the need to weaponize schools by paying teachers and coaches “a little bit of a bonus” for bringing a firearm into school every day.

“He wasn’t listening to us, mainly because he only listens to people putting money in his pockets,” Parkland student Samuel Zeif said at the time. “In this case, blood money. My friend’s blood. A lot of my classmates’ blood. I don’t think we’re going to get far with him right now.”

As for the “little fun” Trump was excited to have in Texas on Thursday when he wasn’t meeting with parents who just buried their children, that may have been in reference to the deep-pocketed fundraiser he also attended that day at a luxury hotel in downtown Houston.

That’s Trump’s true priority.


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