Atlanta Mayor Blames Controversial Arbery Shooting on Trump
If you’re a Democratic politician, it always comes back to Donald Trump.
This includes the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery. Two white men have been arrested in the killing of Arbery, a black man, after a video of his shooting in Brunswick, Georgia, on Feb. 23 was released on social media.
Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis McMichael, 34, have been charged with murder and aggravated assault in the case, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
The facts of the situation, to an outside observer, look particularly vile. The McMichaels claim that they’d tracked down Arbery because, they said, he appeared to match the description of a burglar in the neighborhood.
If you’ve seen the video — and if not, it’s best if not viewed — it shows two very angry men chasing down a man who appears to be jogging, initiating a physical conflict with him and then shooting him, purportedly in self-defense.
It looks horrible. The president has said it looks horrible. And yet, the mayor of Atlanta thinks Trump is somehow responsible for the killing, calling it a “a lynching of an African-American man.”
“It’s part of a bigger issue we’re having in this country,” Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said in an interview with CNN Sunday.
i“With the rhetoric we’re hearing coming out of the White House, many who are prone to being racist are given permission to do it in an overt way that you would otherwise not see in 2020.”
“It’s heartbreaking that it’s 2020 and this was a lynching of an African American man,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms says about the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery. https://t.co/GGX09XO2Ra #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/GiEUoqozF0
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) May 10, 2020
Say again?
It’s not as if President Trump hasn’t weighed in on the controversy — and what he said is hardly permission for racists to go out and kill people.
Trump called it “very disturbing” incident and expressed sympathy for Arbery.
“I looked at a picture of that young man. He was in a tuxedo … I will say that that looks like a really good young guy,” Trump said.
In fact, he used exactly the same word as Bottoms, “heartbreaking.”
In regard to racial tensions, Trump said that “justice getting done is the thing that solves that problem.”
This hardly seems a White House inciting a rabblement of closet racists to attack blacks. In fact, there’s not a word in there that Mayor Bottoms would disagree with. So where’s this rhetoric she speaks of? Where’s the evidence that the McMichaels were somehow influenced by the president to shoot Ahmaud Arbery?
Bottoms has made an accusation that’s both grotesque and incendiary — and yet, not unsurprising, given what the left will blame Trump for.
I know it feels like a century ago, but it’s been just a few months since Iran shot down a Ukrainian jetliner. Why? Because they thought it could be a cruise missile fired by the United States in response to Iran’s attacks on American targets following the strike that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Shooting down that plane was all on Iran — yet Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tacitly blamed Trump for the death of 57 Canadians on board the flight.
“If there were no tensions, if there was no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families,” Trudeau said.
In the U.S., celebrity liberals Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar on ABC’s “The View” used an interview with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff to blame Trump, too.
During the coronavirus crisis, Trump’s been blamed for everything from ventilator shortages in New York to ignoring the realities of an incipient pandemic that the media refused to take seriously themselves.
He’s been blamed for mass shootings in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and El Paso, Texas.
Now, he’s being blamed by the mayor of Atlanta for a killing that the media thinks might be race-related because of vague “rhetoric we’re hearing coming out of the White House.”
It’s worth noting that Keisha Lance Bottoms is trying to make a national name for herself. She’s doing a smash-up job, so much so that she’s even considered a long-shot possibility for Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick, according to Forbes. This rhetoric, sadly, doesn’t hurt her case among Democratic voters.
This is the Democratic playbook for the 2020 election: Trump is the wellspring of all of our problems, all of the world’s tensions, all of the jobs lost to COVID-19 lockdowns. Everything will magically get better if you elect Joe Biden president and give Democrats control of both houses of Congress.
The killing of Ahmaud Arbery shouldn’t be grist for the hate-Trump mill. His alleged murder is vulgarized and minimized when it’s reduced to simply a talking point in a political campaign.
In this respect, Mayor Bottoms’ remarks were shameful. Woe be on America if this kind of politicking gets her a spot on the presidential ticket.
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