Newsletter: Opinion: Orlando victims, step aside — Trump has the media spotlight

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, The Times’ letters editor, and it is Saturday, June 18, 2016. Summer officially begins Monday, and the record temperatures are expected to arrive here right on schedule.

While it’s still cool, let’s take a look back at the week in Opinion.

It didn’t take long for Donald Trump to eclipse the Orlando massacre as the biggest news story of the moment.

Trump’s first attempt to garner some attention hours after news broke that 49 people had been killed early Sunday morning at a gay nightclub in Orlando — his tweet expecting “congrats for being right” on suspending Muslim immigration to the U.S. — didn’t dominate the news cycle. So Trump did what always works: He gave a speech, made further inflammatory comments about Muslims and implied the president was somehow complicit in the attack.

In so doing, says The Times’ editorial board, the candidate known for exploring the depths of election-year rhetoric set a new low, even for himself:

Trump — who made hay during Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign by pushing “birther” challenges to Obama’s citizenship — told television interviewers Monday that Obama may be willfully standing down in the face of terrorist plots by Islamic radicals, lending credence to a conspiracy theory pushed by folks who stubbornly cling to the fiction that the president is a Kenyan-born Muslim.

“Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump said on Fox News. “And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”

What’s inconceivable is Trump suggesting Obama may be endangering the people he has sworn to protect based on nothing more than the chatter of political lunatics. This isn’t the first time Trump has used innuendo to introduce personal smears as though he’s a small-town gossip. You can almost hear him whisper, “I’m not saying this, but others are talking…” before channeling the kind of garbage that lives out on the political fringes.

Trump doubled down on his anti-Muslim hate-mongering in a speech in New Hampshire in which he warned that “radical Islam is coming” and pledged to ban immigration from areas of the world in which anti-U.S or anti-European terrorism may arise. Never mind that the shooter in Orlando was a native New Yorker. In Trump’s view, the government has no mechanism for keeping children of immigrants from radicalizing. So not only would he ban adherents of a major world religion for the acts of the few, he also indicts them for the imagined crimes of their unborn children. And he urged Muslim communities to “turn in the people who they know are bad – and they do know where they are,” implying Muslims are intentionally shielding terrorists.

We’ve said before that Trump’s shoot-from-the-lip persona makes him unsuited for the presidency, and we’ll keep saying it right up until the election, when we hope he fades from the national stage and takes his repugnant intolerance with him. Yet we also fear his campaign has given currency to dangerously wrong ideas about race, religion and proper conduct of a civil society. More reasonable minds recognize those ideas as intellectually and morally bankrupt, and they should recognize the boastful messenger for what he is.

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Trump is not just any conspiracy theorist. Jesse Walker, who wrote the book (literally) on understanding paranoia in America, says Trump’s conspiracy theorizing has two purposes: to cast suspicion on his political rivals, and to cast the object of his paranoia as a kind of invader acting against the national interest. L.A. Times

Yes, the NRA and its sycophants in Congress bear some responsibility for Orlando. It’s important to understand the motives of the killer and any possible security lapses that occurred before Sunday. But this shouldn’t distract us from the issue of all-too-ready access to guns in America, says The Times’ editorial board. L.A. Times

Don’t blame Muslims; the LGBT community isn’t. Nico Lang implores us to avoid scapegoating Muslim Americans. Melissa Batchelor Warnke spotlights LGBT voices speaking out on the Orlando massacre; she also highlights the constant threat of violence faced by members of that community. One reader satirically expands on Trump’s “respectful” plan to spy on Muslims. Jonah Goldberg laments the script-reading that occurred by familiar liberal and conservative voices after the shooting. The Times’ editorial board shoots down calls to ban firearm sales to suspected terrorists. An Op-Ed article wrestles with the moral dilemma of worshiping the loving, homophobic god of Abraham. More post-Orlando reaction can be found at latimes.com/opinion.

Hillary Clinton rose from losing badly in 2008 in the Democratic primary to being on her way to the White House in 2016. Foreign Policy magazine columnist Suzanne Nossel writes that “Clinton’s dexterity in defeat holds lessons for anyone faced with coming back from a harsh setback — that is to say, for all of us.” L.A. Times

Solar and wind are great, but nuclear is even better. Six nuclear reactors, from Nebraska to New York, are slated for shutdown by 2019. Energy researcher Robert Bryce says that should seriously concern anyone who cares about fighting global warming. L.A. Times

Bernie Sanders has ignited a Democratic Party debate on Israel. Ben Ehrenreich, who recently returned from a trip to the West Bank, credits the party’s presumptive runner-up for appointing two well-known activists sympathetic to the Palestinian cause to the key committee responsible for drafting the Democratic Party platform. L.A. Times

Reach me: paul.thornton@latimes.com.