MSNBC’s John Heilemann put Trump’s cheap national emergency stunt in perspective by saying that the real emergency is guns, not the southern border.

Heilemann said on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House:

We thought we would talk about it as political theater, as empty symbolism, as grotesque, as inappropriate as setting a bad precedent, as a million different things, but it set so much now in the context of this, however bad this turns out to be, another mass shooting,

I’m looking at the statistics, 323 in 2018. 323 mat shootings in 2018, nearly one a day in America. I don’t know what definitions — I don’t know how to define an emergency, but I’ll tell you that if you listen to the experts who talk about what’s happening on the southern border and look at the number of mass shootings in America, before you go to solutions or anything else, I think we can all look around and say this is an emergency.

I spent my week last week in any part of this week in Minneapolis-St. Paul with Amy Klobuchar announcing her campaign when she was there with Beto O’Rourke in El Paso when Trump was there. A lot of people were going up saying is the border an emergency? Do you think we’re in the middle of an emergency or not? Some people said yes but a lot more said that’s not an emergency. An emergency is guns. An emergency is climate change. An emergency is the state of our schools. An emergency is health care in America. An emergency is the opioid crisis. A lot of people had a lot of things on their lists of what they thought in their lives and cities and communities were emergency, a lot of them, not all of them, a lot of them mentioned guns. This is the kind of thing when you think about this and think about what the president did today basically admitting what he was doing was a cheap, empty, meaningless political ploy, it makes your stomach churn.

Video:

America is reminded of what a real national emergency looks like

A national emergency is not a fake border crisis that was created by a sinking president who believes that his reelection depends on building a wall. A real national emergency is the fact that a mass shooting occurs in the United States on an almost daily basis. When Trump and the White House marked the first anniversary of the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, they never mentioned guns or gun violence.

Real emergencies can’t be hidden, created, or delayed. Real emergencies kill and injure innocent people every day.

The real emergency is the one that Donald Trump doesn’t want to talk about, but it is killing people every day.

Mass shootings are the true national emergency.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

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Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

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