Donald Trump acted like a “toddler” during a private meeting with the parents of students killed in a Texas school shooting, a grieving mother claims.
This week, Trump met for more than an hour with families who lost loved ones in the May shooting. Though the meeting was meant to hear their concerns and comfort families, some left feeling even angrier after Trump refused to listen to their concerns and pushed his own ideas on how to stop school shootings, NBC News reported.
Rhonda Hart, whose 14-year-old daughter was killed in the shooting, said Donald Trump repeatedly referred to the gunman as “wacky” and seemed fixated on the idea of arming teachers in the school. Hart, an Army veteran, suggested the idea of having veterans serve as sentinels in the school. When Trump asked if they should be armed, Hart said no.
But Trump could not leave the idea alone, she claimed, proposing several more times that teachers should be armed.
“It was like talking to a toddler,” Hart said.
This is not the first time that Donald Trump has been accused of insensitivity when speaking to the family members of people who had been killed. Last year, he sparked controversy when telling the family of slain U.S. service member La David Johnson that the young man “knew what he was signing up for.” Family members said that Trump also did not know Johnson’s name during the call.
“The President said that he knew what he signed up for, but it hurts anyway,” widow Myeshia Johnson told Good Morning America (via Time ). “And it made me cry because I was very angry at the tone of his voice and how he said he couldn’t remember my husband’s name.”
Prior to the controversy, Trump had claimed that he made phone calls to all those killed in the line of duty and that his predecessors had not, but both George W. Bush and Barack Obama made regular calls to grieving family members.
Rhonda Hart, whose 14-year-old daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, was killed at the school, told The Associated Press that Trump “kept mentioning” arming classroom teachers. “It was like talking to a toddler,” Hart said. https://t.co/vOxRN2Fa2l
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 1, 2018
Donald Trump was also accused of trying to use a previous school shooting to bring attention to himself. After a February shooting in Parkland, Florida, Trump visited one of the students who had been shot. A picture taken of Trump at the student’s hospital bedside was then used in a Republican fundraising email .
Donald Trump had spoken frequently about the idea of arming teachers as a possible response to school shootings.
