Trump Lovingly Reenacts Paris Massacre at NRA Meeting
President Donald Trump addressed the National Rife Association’s annual meeting in Indianapolis, IN, on Friday, drawing cheers and the occasional enthusiastic hoot from the gun lobby attendees during his hour-long speech.
Trump’s speech was both shocking in its casual derangement and surprisingly uninspired, hitting all the president’s now-standard applause lines about bad immigrants, socialist Democrats, and fake news. However, as Trump began to wind down his remarks, he appeared to veer off-script to deliver a wildly inappropriate reenactment of the 2015 Bataclan nightclub massacre in which ISIS-affiliated terrorists murdered nearly 100 people attending an Eagles of Death Metal concert in Paris.
Attempting to make the point that, had the concert-goers been armed, the attack could have been averted, Trump menacingly pointed finger-guns at the NRA crowd, demonstrating his version of the mass-shooting.
“The shooting went on so long, and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it,” Trump intoned, before assuming the persona of one of the terrorist attackers.“Get over here—Boom. Get over here—Boom,” he repeated, as he punctuated each sentence with his imaginary pistols.
Bizarre as Trump’s reenactment was, this was not the first time he’d pantomimed the Bataclan massacre for the NRA—to France’s outrage. After similarly describing the Paris attack during last year’s NRA speech, former French President François Hollande directly rebuked Trump on Twitter, calling his remarks “shameful” and “obscene.”
The French Foreign Ministry also criticized Trump’s use of the Bataclan massacre during that year’s NRA speech, saying in a statement that “France expresses its firm disapproval of President Trump’s remarks.”
Still, despite French objections—more of which may very well be on their way—Trump nevertheless felt the need to dredge up the memory of one of the worst terrorist attacks in the past decade all over again, just to score points with his most fervent supporters.