During the Obama administration, the GOP not only abdicated the idea that the President should play the role of mourner-in-chief; they came to treat the role with scorn and ridicule.
When President Obama broke into tears during a press conference after the Sandy Hook shooting on December 14, 2012, Fox News host Andrea Tantaros was quick to complain that Obama’s crying was “not really believable,” suggesting he hid an onion in his lectern. Meghan McCain echoed these sentiments: “It just didn’t seem horribly authentic. And maybe it is; I don’t know him at all,” she said. “Go to your hometown of Chicago instead of talking about God-fearing Americans when ISIS is coming to their hometown.”
The tone-policing of authentic expressions of grief was vital to the dehumanizing of the children killed at Sandy Hook. In the process, the right has had to work overtime to suppress scenes of mourning for the tens of thousands of other victims of preventable gun violence since.
This tactic lasted throughout Obama’s presidency: In a 2016 op-ed, Sarah Palin once again mocked Obama for weeping while “he blamed law-abiding patriots for the nation’s insecurity and sought to strip them of the Constitutional rights that generations of Americans shed blood to protect,” while the National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke called Obama’s tears “embarrassing,” “irrational,” “dishonest,” and “ultimately weak.”
Grief is messy and unpredictable; it lashes out in all directions. Grief can be used against you as easily as you use it against your enemies.
Republicans seem to have learned that once you have taught people to instrumentalize grief, you can’t stop them from turning it against you, particularly with — as with the case of gun violence — death that stems entirely from the GOP’s policies and political base. Any politician who would seek to express any kind of bereavement over a mass shooting, or the death of soldiers in a bungled and never-ending war, must be inauthentic. The litany of “thoughts and prayers” is intended to work as a smothering blanket, a ham-handed attempt to sever the link between tragedy and politics, and it provides, at best, temporary cover for the real work of repressing death altogether. When Senator Chuck Schumer broke down during a press conference over the president’s immigration ban (which has resulted in the deaths of dozens of people, including children), Trump was quick to ridicule him as “Fake Tears Chuck Schumer,” eager to obliterate any notion that American policies might trigger a genuine emotional response.
Perhaps expressions of grief now only can happen at a local level, because they no longer serve national interests. In the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in American history — 58 killed at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas — an impromptu memorial sprang up on the Vegas Strip consisting of crosses, flowers, photos, and handwritten signs. It evoked the same kind of spontaneous expressions of grief that marked September 11 and Katrina, an authentic outpouring of emotions from a community grieving together.
During his October 3 remarks about Vegas, Trump did his best to sound presidential (“Hundreds of our fellow citizens are now mourning the sudden loss of a loved one: a parent, a child, a brother or sister. We cannot fathom their pain. We cannot imagine their loss. To the families of the victims, we are praying for you, and we are here for you, and we ask God to help see you through this very dark period.”) But as soon as he was asked by a reporter about gun control, he shifted his stance: “Look, we have a tragedy,” Trump responded. “What happened is, in many ways, a miracle. The police department, they’ve done such an incredible job. And we’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes on.” Politicians on the right have always found it much easier to praise first responders than to face grief; every tragedy is a miracle if you look at it right.
The spontaneous memorial, meanwhile, stayed there for six weeks before it was moved to the Clark County Museum, retired and removed from popular consciousness. While an attempt to design a permanent monument sputters on in fits and starts, the rest of the country seems to have moved on.