Apparently, the man who shot all of those people a few days ago sees Trump as part of the problem - he has not gone far enough in his opinion. So, in my view, to say that Trump is directly to blame for the shootings would be wrong, but indirectly to blame? I think that's different.

When I started this thread, I wondered whether I should put it on the politics board, but decided not to because I thought of the various shootings at schools in America down the years which did not appear to have a political motive behind them, but the way this thread has developed shows that I got it wrong - in these days it seems almost everything is political.

The Trump apologists in this thread (they can't stand him as a man of course) use the old excuse that the apparent perpetrators of the pipe bombs sent to individuals who have been critical of Donald Trump plan and the synagogue shootings are mentally unstable. To the extent that it looks downright odd to plaster your van in posters which would make you look guilty and to advertise what you were going to do on line, these actions, along with the intention to kill of course, do not mark either of them down as sane men.

In the interests of fairness, it should also be pointed out that not all politically motivated killers come from the right, but this article shows that in the last quarter of century in America there have been much more killings from the political right than there have been from the left.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspi...s-on-u-s-soil/

As for Donald Trump, I for one, find the implication carried by the "just blame it all on Trump" line insulting because it seems to me that it carries the assumption that critics of the man were unaware of him until he decided to run for President - that's not true in my case, I despised Donald Trump for all sorts of reasons for a couple of decades before that happened.

In my opinion, Trump cannot escape blame for what we've seen in America from Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers because he uses wholly inappropriate language for someone in the position of great power and influence he finds himself in. In my lifetime, the President of America I can remember who comes closest to comparing to Trump in character is Richard Nixon - in some ways, such a comparison is unfair on Trump mind because he has not been found guilty of the sort of criminal activities Nixon was. However, I saw a programme over the weekend where it was said that Nixon had his mind changed over the Vietnam war when he left the White House to discuss that situation with anti war protesters who were outside the Presidential residence - I find it impossible to believe that Trump would even contemplate doing such a thing.

Trump is unyielding in his opinions and gives no impression whatsoever that he could ever be talked around to a differing viewpoint on the core issues of his Presidency. One of the dangers of this approach is that weak and insecure people (nearly always men) can feel emboldened by such certainty as it helps to create a climate whereby potentially awful thoughts become transformed into actual deeds. We saw something similar in this country with the murder of Jo Cox during the referendum campaign two years ago and how anyone could be shocked by the rise in hate crime following that vote is beyond me given the tone used by some during that campaign.

Trump is either unaware of or doesn't care about the consequences which might follow from some of the things he says - to me, that marks him down as a dangerous and divisive man.