It didn’t take long for presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump to make Sunday morning’s horrific nightclub massacre in Orlando — the worst mass shooting in U.S. history — about himself. This morning, he tweeted:
Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016
Tana Goertz, a former contestant on Trump’s reality TV show The Apprentice who served as one of The Donald’s state co-chairs during the Iowa caucuses, retweeted his self-congratulatory tweet, as well as several others from Trump supporters.
One, from Mike 4 Trump, included the hashtag #VetMuslims — consistent with Trump’s campaign vow to ban all of the world’s Muslims who don’t live here from entering the country (which he walked back somewhat last month):
The shooter, 29-year-old citizen Omar Mateen, reportedly called 911 about 20 minutes into his massacre to pledge his support for ISIS. (Among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, there are only about 31,500 members of ISIS, according to a White House estimate in February.)
Echoing Trump’s Twitter habit of retweeting unverified information for the sake of a low-blow political attack, Goertz, who is now a senior adviser for the Trump campaign, also retweeted a tweet from right-wing actress Stacey Dash claiming that Mateen was a registered Democrat who voted for President Obama (claiming gunmen are registered Democrats in the aftermath of mass shootings is a common, and often untrue, practice of conservatives on social media):
Goertz also used the massacre as an opportunity to criticize Obama’s response to it. One tweet was a reply to Trump’s demand that the president “immediately resign in disgrace” if his speech didn’t include the words “radical Islamic terrorism,” despite that the investigation into the gunman’s motives has only just begun and initial media reports after mass shootings usually include contradictory and incomplete information:
Another retweet, from the conservative filmmaker who directed a conspiratorial documentary alleging that Obama is trying to fundamentally reshape America, touched on a similar theme:
Maybe Trump should hold a press conference of his own to show Obama how it’s done, Goertz concluded:
