After all this time, no one could have expected anything different—but President Trump's response to the deadly shootings over the weekend in Texas and Ohio still had the power to shock. This was his crisis, undeniably tied to his own issues, his own rhetoric, the anger that he's stoked and rode. Yet where his predecessors moved to console communities in mourning, Trump seems to have neither the willingness nor ability to respond on a human level, opting instead to pop-a-shot paper towels to hurricane victims in Puerto Rico, blame “many sides” for the white nationalist rioting in Charlottesville that left one woman dead. When he finally faced the cameras after the weekend's carnage, he read adjectives off of a teleprompter, wearing his longest face, condemning racism and white nationalism (finally!), while mostly blaming video games and mental illness. He offered vague promises to fix things— "I am open and ready to listen and discuss all ideas that will actually work and make a very big difference" — but, understandably, given past performance, many people didn't believe him.

After hitting the links Sunday after more than two dozen people were killed hours apart in El Paso and Dayton, Trump on Monday took to Twitter to offer some prescriptions for dealing with the violence. Before that, he’d called the shootings “terrible,” offered his “thoughts and prayers” to the victims, and condemned the shooters — without mentioning, of course, that the man who killed 20 people and wounded several others at the El Paso Wal-Mart Saturday had parroted his talking points on immigration in a racist manifesto he published just before the attack. On Monday, though, he had some ideas he said he hoped would produce “something good, if not GREAT” out of the shootings.

He seemed at first glance Monday to open the door to some movement on strengthening background checks — a reform gun control advocates have sought in the wake of high profile shootings, including the recent tragedies in Dayton, El Paso, and a week earlier in Gilroy, California. But it immediately became clear that the proposal was made in highly questionable faith, as the president quickly floated tying the sensible gun measure to unnamed immigration reform — coming close to blaming the victim. “We cannot let those killed in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, die in vain,” Trump wrote. “Republicans and Democrats must come together and get strong background checks, perhaps marrying this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform.” Trump seems to be poised to use gun reform as yet another bargaining chip to use in negotiations for his draconian border policies, just as he did with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2017. Holding DREAMers hostage to his border crackdown was cruel enough, but his appeals to gun control as leverage for his anti-immigration fantasies is particularly crass here, considering alleged El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius appeared to be targeting Hispanic immigrants to stave off, in his mind, an “invasion” of the country.

That this is the precise language Trump himself uses to describe Mexican and Central American migrants, of course, intensified scrutiny on the president, who has stoked rabid anti-immigrant anger among his supporters. Indeed, it was only a few months ago that he treated the notion of gunning down undocumented immigrants as a punchline.

“How do you stop these people?” he said of immigrants at a May rally in Florida.

“Shoot them!” someone in the audience replied.