The weird question Monday was whether President Trump was tying background checks for gun-buyers to federal voter-identification laws.
Or was he typically rambling so incoherently that he managed to adjoin the wholly unrelated issues inadvertently in one of his standard run-on verbal emissions?
By Tuesday the question began to appear moot. The Atlantic reported that Trump had called Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association to tell him universal background checks were off the table.
Several days had passed since the horrors in El Paso and Dayton. Predictably, the gun lobby seemed to have gotten to the pliable president with its warnings of trouble in his political base if he tried to make more people get checked out before buying guns. And the intensity of Trump's need to appear heroic in the moment on cable television perhaps had waned.
After all, a creature of the celebrity culture can't stay focused forever. The cable news stations must begin in time to change the "breaking news" flashes across the screen. This president's priorities change as the screen images change.
Trump has long demonstrated a perfect willingness to spout cynical policy nonsense--such as that we'd need to require stricter voter ID if we were going to check people's backgrounds before they buy guns--as well as to blend entirely unrelated thoughts in a single flourish of self-serving bluster.
He invoked all of that in an extensive Q-and-A with reporters on departure from his New Jersey golf vacation Sunday.
He got asked about gun control and said bipartisan congressional groups were working hard on it. (That was Sunday; this is Wednesday). But he signaled the looming retreat by invoking hastily that people, not weapons, do the killing.
He said we need to emphasize mental illness and consider that, years ago, we kept more people inside mental institutions than we do now. He said we needed to ... do something on that issue.
Mental-health policy aside, this standard Republican fare holds that we don't need to worry about the kinds of guns we make and sell and the ready availability of them. It holds that we need to worry only about the nutcases who are shooting them.
It goes like this: If you'd put the mentally ill in institutions, then the rest of us could walk down the street in peace with our semiautomatic assault weapons with 100-round magazines.
Basically, in the rawest political terms, Trump and Republicans were trying to find a way to finesse a 90-7 poll finding in favor of universal background checks for gun-buyers. They wanted to gum up the issue, a common and tired tactic. That's because they know that fewer people will buy guns if we have universal background checks and that that will hurt the gun business and Republican fortunes with the base in rural America.
Or, failing that, they want to get something for it--like, as Trump seemed to say, stricter guidelines on who can vote.
Because, you know, you shouldn't inconvenience a gun-buyer if you're also not going to inconvenience a voter.
A reporter asked Trump what voter security had to do with gun laws. Trump said, oh, he didn't mean to say they were related. He was just talking about things kind of free-form.
He tweeted later an equal outrage--that we need stricter voter ID as part of any election security package. In other words, it might not be background checks he wants to hold hostage. He might want to hold hostage any resistance to Russian meddling in our elections.
Either way, that's the problem--or one of the problems--with our current political dysfunction. Issues with merit that tend to accrue to the advantage of one partisan side or the other don't get considered singularly on that merit. They get conjoined with counterpoints, with that old refrain of "yeah, but what about ...", or tied to unrelated countervailing issues by amendment in "omnibus" bills, to cloud their consideration.
Here's what we need:
• To oblige the powerful wisdom of the 90 percent of the people who believe all gun sales, not merely some, should be delayed for a simple and uniform background check.
• To get tough quite separately against Russian meddling in our elections.
• To consider again, quite separately, Trump's allegation that voter fraud is rampant; that, otherwise, there's no way he could have lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.
Trump has offered no evidence at all to support his egomaniacal claim about voter fraud. He ought to show evidence if he has any, and it ought to have nothing in the wide world to do with increased background checks for gun-buyers or long-overdue Republican nerve in standing up to Vladimir Putin.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Web only on 08/21/2019