Axelrod Links Trump to Synagogue Killings: ‘Imbalanced’ People ‘Are Activated by that Kind of Rhetoric’

RUSH EXCERPT:

AXELROD: “Well, first of all, let me say, my heart goes out to the families. It’s a horrible story. And wolf, you know, I know we share some history but my family came here to escape religious persecution, to be safe from this very thing. You expect that in America and the notion you can’t go and worship on a Saturday morning without fear of someone invading the synagogue with assault weapons and killing people is a horrendous thought. It’s a really sad day, not just for me but for our country and I hope it’s an occasion. We will have this debate again. We’ve been having this debate over guns. We probably will have another chapter of it after this event. But I also hope we have some discussion, some reflection about the course, the discordant nature of our public dialogue now because I have no doubt the president, you know, didn’t want to encourage, approve anything like this. If you create a siege, there’s people imbalanced in our society like the guy who sent out the bombs to the public officials who are activated by that kind of rhetoric and we really need to take a step back. The most important thing isn’t for the president to visit Pittsburgh but it’s to sit back and think about the rhetoric that he’s using and everyone in public life needs to do the same thing. But we heard this man held Jews responsible for this invasion of refugees from Latin America that he’d been ranting about this on his posts. We know what we’ve heard in the politics the last few weeks and we hear it at the president’s rallies all the time about treating this rag tag band of refugees a thousand miles away as an invading army and if you speak in that siege language, you’re going to activate paranoid madmen like the guy, bowers, who ran into the synagogue today with the intent to kill. So this should be a pause for reflection, not for obligatory statements of sadness, and the gun debate is clearly important, but there’s something bigger going on that we’ve seen play out in the last week that deserves our attention.”