Well, it took two days and multiple Tweets attacking the press, but popular-vote loser Donald Trump finally communicated a response to the brutal stabbing of three people in Portland, OR who tried to stop a white supremacist from verbally assaulting two Muslim woman:
President Donald Trump condemned the racially charged Portland, Oregon, train stabbings on Monday, tweeting that they were "unacceptable."
"The violent attacks in Portland on Friday are unacceptable. The victims were standing up to hate and intolerance. Our prayers are w/ them," read the tweet from the official @POTUS account.
And it must have been Trump that Tweeted that Tweet, because Vice President (and leading man in the upcoming reboot of Father Knows Best— tentatively titled Mother Knows Best ) Mike Pence gives it — what else? A hearty “Amen!”
Vice President Mike Pence echoed Trump's sentiment on Twitter."Well said, Mr. President," he tweeted Monday afternoon. "Our thoughts and prayers are with the heroes in Portland and the loved ones they left behind."
Thoughts and prayers. What a great idea. I guess Pol Potbelly’s human after all…
...or IS he? Just because TPM's headline says Trump “belatedly responded” to the horrific incident on the Portland MAX train is no reason to believe our Dear Leader responded at all!
As has been pointed out previously, there are two Trump presences on Twitter:
One, who goes by the Twitter handle @POTUS, is gracious, understated and humble. Since taking office, @POTUS has posted seven messages, three of them merely to say thank you…
(Snip)
The second president is the more familiar one. Posting to Twitter under the handle @realDonaldTrump, he is full of braggadocio, prone to leave out facts, sometimes harshly critical of his adversaries and more than a bit thin-skinned.
In a half-dozen Twitter messages since his inauguration, @realDonaldTrump boasted about “GREAT reviews” for his Inaugural Address and noted with pride that 31 million people in the United States had watched his inauguration on television — making sure to note that it was more than the number who watched President Obama’s inauguration four years ago.
In short, the person who Tweeted from the “official” POTUS account that the Portland attack was “unacceptable” was probably whatever intern got the assignment after somebody in the WH press office noticed that a few people — like the victims’ surviving relatives and friends, for a start — were not pleased that Trump had spent all his post-G7 Twitter time bitching about “fake news”, and none of it on a real event that would shake any normal human being to the core. One wonders if the intern was given the phenomenally weak descriptor “unacceptable” or came up with it on his or her own.
And there’s the other reason we know Donald Trump had nothing to do with the “response” that apparently checked off the box that says, “Message: I care.” Look at the text again:
"The violent attacks in Portland on Friday are unacceptable. The victims were standing up to hate and intolerance. Our prayers are w/ them.”
Forget the fact that the Tweeter couldn’t even use the full word “with” in the text. At least s/he didn’t try to save characters by saying, “The violent attacks @ Portland...” Here’s how we know this Tweet never sprang from our Dear Leader’s tiny, tiny thumbs:
It doesn’t berate.
It doesn’t blame.
It doesn’t shame.
It doesn’t humiliate.
It doesn’t give the victims cute nicknames.
It doesn’t say it’s CNN’s fault.
Most importantly, it doesn’t take credit for something Trump didn’t do in the first place — like realize that the hatred and ugliness that has always been part of the Trump dialectic has given mutants like Jeremy Joseph Christian the unspoken permission to take all that venom that’s been metastasizing inside them like a cancer and take it out on whoever happens to offend them.
