On Wednesday afternoon, a 19-year-old murdered 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in one of the deadliest school shootings in modern U.S. history. He did so using a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle that he legally purchased in a state where it’s easier to buy such a weapon—originally designed for military combat—than it is a handgun. So naturally, when Thursday dawned, a lot of people who were already pissed off were even more enraged at the fact that lawmakers have steadfastly refused to do anything about gun control in America because they’ve been bought off by the N.R.A.. Given that yesterday’s tragedy marked the 18th school shooting in the last 45 days, one would wouldn’t think it would be hugely controversial to suggest that elected officials maybe consider changing gun laws, a move overwhelmingly favored by their constituents. Presumably, this is what Steven Mnuchin was thinking when he told the House Ways and Means Committee during a hearing on Thursday that, “It’s a tragedy what we’ve seen yesterday, and I urge Congress to look at these issues.” And then, he remembered who he works for.

Within hours of Mnuchin’s comment, a spokesman for the Treasury Department clarified that the secretary wasn‘t at all suggesting that Congress take meaningful action on guns. Instead, Treasury spokesman Tony Sayegh said, Mnuchin was simply addressing a question about the “availability of funds in the budget” to “examine the proliferation of mass shootings in the United States,” and was in no way encouraging Congress to do something crazy like pass stricter gun-control legislation

To an outside observer, this may seem like a senseless bit of backpedalling. But this is how the Trump administration works. On the off-chance someone has an urge to do or say something remotely rational, that instinct is immediately stomped out because no one one is allowed to contradict Trump or shine a light on his pathological narcissism, racism, or stupidity. Remember when Gary Cohn had the audacity to tell the Financial Times that the White House needed to do a better job condemning hate organizations like the K.K.K., after his boss declared that there were some “very fine people” in the group of white nationalists responsible for the violence in Charlottesville? Cohn was almost immediately yanked from the running for the Fed chair job Trump had hinted was his and spent the next several months in the dog house. Or when Kellyanne Conway had to walk back her hugely controversial stance that an accused child molester should not serve in the Senate, because she was reminded tax cuts were on the line? Good thing she acted fast, or she would’ve certainly found herself in time-out.

Obviously, Mnuchin’s comment consisted of a completely benign series of words that, in reality, were nowhere near as direct or charged as they should have been. But because he works for Trump—who blamed the massacre on the shooter’s neighbors and classmates and took about as much time to address the matter as he did to flame Nordstrom for dropping Ivanka Trump’s clothing line—he has to take them back as though he’d announced that the administration plans to make up for the revenue lost to tax cuts through human trafficking.

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Trump official who made up a fake award to take wife on taxpayer-funded European vacation will pay us back