Parkland survivor assails Trump as ‘professional liar’ after president’s NRA speech
"This is all spectacle," says teenager Cameron Kasky.
Jason Linkins May 5, 2018, 3:01 pm
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Cameron Kasky speaks at a rally for gun control at the Broward County Federal Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. / RHONA WISE/AFP Getty Images
During his speech at the National Rifle Association’s annual conference in Dallas, Texas, President Donald Trump delighted the crowd by making reference to some of his greatest hits of campaign rhetoric, in which he made a bigoted attack on Mexican immigrants.
That these commitments have fallen by the wayside did not escape the attention of Cameron Kasky, one of the Parkland survivors who has been publicly vocal about the need to enact some degree of common sense gun reform legislation. During a Saturday morning appearance on CNN’s “New Day,” Kasky laced into the president for being two-faced on the matter.
“He’s a professional liar who will say anything to appease whatever crowd he’s at,” Kasky said. “If he’s in front of families, he might say something in support of common-sense gun reform, but then when he’s at the NRA, he’ll say something to get a big cheer.
Kasky went on: “This is all spectacle. This is all just Trump trying to appeal to a crowd of people who really, really, really like weapons that shoot bullets fast.”
Like Kasky, Smith noted that Trump’s public proclamations of support to the NRA membership came not long after he spoke about the way the organization used its “great power” to influence the debate and strike fear into the hearts of lawmakers. Smith also cited Trump’s previous offerings to put reform on the table, only to withdraw his support after the fact.
Elsewhere, the Washington Post’s Dan Balz issued something of a cri du coeur over Trump’s serial duplicity, in the pages of his paper. Per Balz:
While the proximate cause of Balz’s torsion is Trump’s deceit in the matter of Stormy Daniels, this is perhaps a hopeful sign that the Beltway’s most sage prognosticators are slowly but surely catching up to America’s teenagers in their overall awareness of our national predicament.
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