The United States is still reeling from the two shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio this past weekend which resulted in the deaths of 31 people.
As young students return to school at the end of summer break, the all-too-familiar threat of a mass shooting erupting at their learning institutions continues to loom.
Trump was asked about this fear and what he would say to the students experiencing it. He answered with the amount of sympathy he's come to be known for.
Watch below:
“My message to young children going back to school is go and really study hard," Trump said. "Someday you’ll grow up and maybe be president of the United States or do something else fantastic. They have nothing to fear, they have nothing to worry about.”
He continued, bringing up former President Barack Obama:
"In addition, we're in constant contact with states and state government...We have this so much better than it was two and a half years ago. Two and a half years ago when I came in, it was really not a good situation. I think we have a really good system right now."
He finished off by warning the children he'd said have nothing to fear that
"That doesn't mean there's not gonna be some crazy person, but that's what we want to do. We want to take the guns out of the hands of crazy, demented sick people."
It's unclear by which metric Trump was comparing the situation to two and a half years ago.
In Trump's first two and a half years in office, there have been 19 active shooter incidents on a K-12 campus. Obama's entire eight year presidency had 27. Last year saw more active shooter incidents on a K-12 campus than any year on record.
Even though the facts weren't on his side, people weren't surprised to see Trump mention his predecessor.
Trump frequently blames or otherwise compares himself to Obama. He's tweeted about him 2,792 times—almost quadruple the amount of times he's mentioned his other arch-rival, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
During a back to school speech in his first year as president, Obama said to high school students:
"The story of America isn't about people who quit when things got tough. It's about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.It's the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.
So today, I want to ask you, what's your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?"
Those were the days.
@WhiteHouse/X
