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Trump Heads to Las Vegas to Pay His Respects After Shooting Trump Visits Las Vegas to Pay His Respects After Shooting
(about 4 hours later)
WASHINGTON — President Trump said it was a “very sad day” on Wednesday as he left for Las Vegas to pay his respects after one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history. LAS VEGAS — President Trump traveled here on Wednesday to comfort victims of Sunday’s deadly mass shooting and salute those who tended to them, taking up a harrowing duty of the modern presidency that has nevertheless become numbing in its regularity.
“It’s a very, very sad day for me personally,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re going to pay our respects and to see the police who have done really a fantastic job in a very short time.” A day after he visited hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, Mr. Trump traded a natural disaster for one inflicted by man: 58 people killed by an assailant raining bullets into a crowded country music festival from the window of his hotel room high above them.
Late Sunday a gunman fired into a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip, killing 58 people and himself and injuring more than 500 others. “It’s a very sad thing,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he left the White House in the morning. “We’re going to pay our respects and to see the police who have done really a fantastic job in a short time.”
Mr. Trump said law enforcement was learning more about the gunman, Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old retired accountant. Those details, Mr. Trump said, would be “announced at the appropriate time.” The president said the authorities were learning more about the gunman, Stephen C. Paddock, who killed himself in his room before police burst in, but he did not share any details. On Monday, he referred to Mr. Paddock as “a sick man, a demented man.”
The president’s visit comes as Democrats called for tighter control on guns, particularly firearms accessories like those that enabled Mr. Paddock to fire hundreds of rounds per minute into a crowd attending a concert. As the president was flying to Las Vegas, tensions inside his administration erupted back in Washington. On Air Force One, TV screens carried Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson’s refusal to comment on an NBC News report that he had called Mr. Trump a “moron.” He also insisted that he had never considered resigning.
Republicans immediately pushed back against calls for gun control, but Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that “gun laws” would be discussed in the future. The president, tweeting from the plane, derided the report as “#FakeNews.” Afterward, the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, told reporters that Mr. Trump still had confidence in Mr. Tillerson.
Mr. Paddock had carefully planned his assault, placing surveillance cameras in his hotel room and in the hallway. The police found him dead, with 23 guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in his hotel room. “As we’ve said many times before,” Ms. Sanders said, “if the president does not have confidence in somebody, they will no longer remain in their position.” She declined to say whether Mr. Tillerson had been instructed by the White House to deliver his statement.
Mr. Trump, on Tuesday, described what he called a “miracle” — the quick response from law enforcement. Mr. Trump repeated his praise for police on Wednesday and said they did a “fantastic” job. Mr. Trump has been uncharacteristically subdued about the Las Vegas shooting, one of the deadliest in American history. He has tweeted little about it and deflected questions about the killer’s motives, in contrast with previous mass shootings, which have drawn quick, furious reactions from him, particularly when the perpetrators were Muslim.
With no evidence linking Mr. Paddock to militant Islamic groups, this crime appears unlike the shootings in Orlando, Fla., or San Bernardino, Calif., both of which Mr. Trump seized on, as a candidate, to justify his ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries and to highlight the scourge of what he labels “radical Islamic terrorism.”
For Mr. Trump, the political subtext of Las Vegas has more to do with gun laws, which he campaigned against in 2016. On Tuesday, the president said this was not the moment to talk about new legislation, but he added, “We’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes on.”
That appeared to open the door at least a crack, which was enough to rattle opponents of gun control. Breitbart News, the far-right website run by Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, said his political base would not tolerate the president softening his defense of gun rights.
Mr. Bannon has told colleagues that he planned to keep Mr. Trump “under a microscope” while he was in Las Vegas to make sure he does not signal any further flexibility on gun legislation.
Mr. Trump would prefer to keep the focus Wednesday on the police and other law enforcement officials, whom he has repeatedly praised for quickly tracking down the gunman in his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. That is familiar, comfortable ground for him.
But he will also have to play a less comfortable role: that of the nation’s chief consoler. In reacting to other tragedies, Mr. Trump has struggled to convey empathy — defaulting to anger at the perpetrators, or, as in the case of the recent hurricanes, praise for his government’s response.
On Tuesday, in Puerto Rico, Mr. Trump delivered cheers for the military, his cabinet and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But his interactions with those who survived the storm were an awkward mix of campaign-style high jinks — at one point, he tossed rolls of paper towels into a crowd — and ill-timed attempts at humor, as when he told officials of Puerto Rico’s debt-ridden administration that “you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack.”
So far, Mr. Trump has stuck to a presidential script in speaking about Las Vegas. On Monday, in an address to the nation, he called for Americans to seek unity and peace over division.
“Our unity cannot be shattered by evil,” the president said, reading from a teleprompter. “Our bonds cannot be broken by violence. And though we feel such great anger at the senseless murder of our fellow citizens, it is our love that defines us today — and always will, forever.”
It is not a natural message, coming from a president who has often exploited divisions in American society, even in the wake of shootings, when he has zeroed in on the role of Muslims or accused opponents like Hillary Clinton of advocating wide-open immigration policies.
Even presidents with different politics and temperaments have struggled with how to respond to these shootings. Mr. Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, wept when he spoke of the slaughter of children at a Connecticut schoolhouse, and sang the hymn “Amazing Grace” when he eulogized the black parishioners gunned down in a church in Charleston, S.C.
After Congress failed to enact legislation after the Sandy Hook, Conn., shooting, Mr. Obama shed tears again — this time in anger at a political establishment he said was in thrall to the National Rifle Association.
But late in his presidency, after police officers were shot in Dallas, a weary Mr. Obama spoke of feeling as though he had run out of words to adequately express either sorrow or resolve in the face of such relentless violence.