Ivanka Trump: Let’s Focus On the Shootings My Dad Isn’t Responsible For – By Bess Levin (Vanity Fair) / Aug 6 2019
The first daughter is suddenly filled with concern about violence in Chicago, which she never mentioned until her dad was blamed for a mass shooting in El Paso.
On Sunday, following a mass shooting in El Paso whose perpetrator wrote of an immigrant “invasion,” and one in Dayton, Ohio, perpetrated by a guy who reportedly kept a “hit list” and a “rape list,” Ivanka Trump took to Twitter to “pray” for the victims and condemn “white supremacy” and “heinous and cowardly acts of hate, terror and violence.” Unfortunately the statements didn’t garner the good press the first daughter was presumably hoping for, as many people believe her boss-dad is to blame for stoking said violence through his racist, anti-immigrant, misogynist rhetoric—which has included literally lamenting that the government can’t stop migrants from crossing the border by shooting them. There’s also the matter of Trump not just putting up with her father’s inflammatory commentary, but also attempting to convince people he doesn’t mean the sickening things he says and, in some cases, that he never said them in the first place. Yes, she’s quite the chip off the ole block.
So on Tuesday, the woman who thinks she could be president tried a new tack: attempting to shift the focus from shootings for which her dad can be directly blamed, to ones for which she thinks he bares zero responsibility. “As we grieve over the evil mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, let us not overlook that Chicago experienced its deadliest weekend of the year,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “With 7 dead and 52 wounded near a playground in the Windy City- and little national outrage or media coverage- we mustn’t become numb to the violence faced by inner city communities every day.”
That people are regularly shot and killed in Chicago, and that the violence rarely receives as much coverage as other mass shootings, is of course true, but the first daughter‘s concern might’ve seemed at least slightly sincere had she expressed it at any other time than while her father is taking heat for whipping racists into a frenzy and creating an environment in which they believe it’s okay to go on killing sprees if their targets are of the nonwhite variety. (Her previous mentions of the Windy City mostly center around promoting spa treatments and cocktails at the Trump Hotel Chicago, plus a photo op with the new mayor.) It would also carry a bit more weight if her father’s comments about “inner city communities” weren’t filled with dog whistles, or if he actually had a plan to reduce the number of gun-related deaths in Chicago by restricting access to firearms, which of course he does not.
Instead the president has refused to endorse gun control measures proposed by Democrats (and some Republicans), such as tougher background checks and banning high-capacity magazines, while blaming the recent carnage on “the perils of the internet and social media.” On Monday, rather than proposing to limit the sales of guns, the president offered vague promises to address “gruesome and grisly video games” and “a culture that celebrates violence.” And in 2017, he made it easier for people with mental illnesses to buy guns, by gutting an Obama-era rule that added people receiving Social Security checks for mental illnesses and individuals deemed unable to handle their own financial affairs to the national background check database. Asked about that decision on Tuesday, the White House told NBC News that the regulation had been “promulgated in the 11th hour of the previous administration” and that it had gone “too far.” Weirdly the first daughter had nothing to say about that.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago fact-checked Ivanka’s tweets (“It wasn’t a playground, it was a park. It wasn’t seven dead. It wasn’t 52 wounded in one incident, which is what this suggests.”) and said that she “isn’t going to be distracted by nonsense tweets from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/ivanka-trump-mass-shootings
