This morning the nation awoke to the news that a sniper fired hundreds of rounds into a crowd of concertgoers at a music festival at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. Fifty people are confirmed dead as of this writing and more than four hundred are injured. The death toll will almost certainly rise and once again, America is shaken by the news that its core has been attacked by a madman and by the insanity of our times.
But who is to blame for this? I have a suspicion that many people will put, at least part of the blame on the occupant of the Oval Office. Donald J. Trump has conducted the first year of his presidency as if he is playing a narcissistic board game in which everyone loses because he must always win. He seems to look at America as an amusing puzzle with lots of moving parts that can be manipulated and stretched and bent. Mostly for his own pathological amusement. What do you give a man who has everything? The Presidency of the United States. What does he do with that gift? He uses it to see how far he can force the country to bend before it breaks.
Trump has been playing with fire, and he continues to play with fire. There are no shortage of crackpots, lunatics and very, very angry people in this country and they are all open to suggestion from "leaders" who forget that words matter.
The nasty rhetoric that has been trafficked by this president eventually finds its way into the sick minds of people who don't seem to get the joke--the joke of a president who thinks attacking nearly everyone whose name is not Donald Trump can have a good end.
No one knows what was really in the mind of this insane murderer who took the lives of scores and scores of innocent human beings this Sunday evening at a music festival in Las Vegas. But you can't help wondering how much the president's dark and ill-conceived words may have contributed to the atmosphere of lunacy that seems to be floating around the air these days.
