The Trump phenomenon is a perpetual example of our political culture's worst excesses, one of which is The Endless Campaign. For decades, observers have warned that a system where members of Congress are constantly running for re-election, and where campaigns involve huge sums of money, will leave representatives spending more time fundraising than doing the job they're elected to do. A 60 Minutes piece in 2016 explored how both Republican and Democratic congresspeople spend as much as four hours a day on the phone peddling for cash.

President Trump pioneered the endless campaign for president when he launched his re-election campaign less than a month into his first term, at least partly so he could continue to hold rallies where he could free-associate his favorite talking points and pile up the sentence fragments as the faithful whoop and cheer. Meanwhile, his supporters have been treated to daily emails soliciting donations. Some offer deals on MAGA merchandise or suggest artificial deadlines to meet some urgent fundraising goal. But this weekend, according to CNN, one email featured something new:

President Donald Trump's re-election campaign used a photo of a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, shooting in an email Saturday that asks its recipients to donate money to the campaign. The email contains a photo of 17-year-old Madeleine Wilford in a hospital bed surrounded by her family, Trump and the first lady...

"Trump is taking steps toward banning gun bump stocks and strengthening background checks for gun purchasers," it says. "The President has made his intent very clear: 'making our schools and our children safer will be our top priority.'"

Near the end of the message, there's a link to the campaign's donations page.

When everything is part of The Endless Campaign, anything can be a political prop—even a teenager who survived the latest episode of our national horror.

Donald J. Trump for President

In this era of shamelessness, you might half expect the president's supporters to come out and defend the use of a mass shooting victim to raise campaign dollars. But even Jason Miller, a former Trump communications aide who is now paid by CNN to defend him on its airwaves, didn't try to defend the email:

This probably is not something the president himself would have seen. I do think it would be appropriate to send out a picture from the official side of things, from the White House, talking about the president visiting with both victims and first responders. I would not have used that picture in a campaign email. And I think going back to the more important point here, is the actual leadership that we've seen from the president. I mean, how remarkable is it that this president went in front of CPAC, a conservative conference, and talked about things that we have to do to make sure that tragedies like this never happen again.

The buck stops with the guy he hired, OK? Mr. Trump doesn't even know how to email. The real art comes in the second half, however, when Miller seems to tacitly admit that it is a novel development for conservatives to discuss actual solutions to the gun violence epidemic. Granted, Trump's still involve getting teachers strapped and having them shoot it out with the next "sicko."

Getty Images

Meanwhile, back in reality, The New York Times reports that Florida teachers—and parents—are looking at other solutions:

Norman Carolino, who was selling body armor at the Tampa show, called the scrapped plans a disservice to people looking for protection. He said most of his sales on Saturday were to teachers, school administrators and “parents who are scared to death.”

“I’m wiped out of everything,” he said. “There are parents in here who’ve never seen the inside of a gun show.”

Juanita Stafford and her husband, Tommy, bought bullet-resistant backpack plates for their eight school-age grandchildren in Florida and Alabama. They received a bulk discount off the $199 price a pad. “We don’t want to be the people going to funerals and saying coulda, woulda, shoulda,” she said. “We’re putting our money where our mouth is.”

Get your eight-year-old some body armor before it's too late. This is the United States of America in 2018, after all. Beyond body armor, gun sales are once again booming after another mass shooting.

Several sellers said they were on track to double their normal sales for a weekend. “It’s sad to say, but whenever there’s a shooting, business only goes up because people are afraid of losing their right to own a certain weapon,” said Quaidman Woody, who was running a booth with his father, a sales representative for CrossHeirs. “So even if they don’t need another AR, they’ll buy another AR or pieces of it.”

Once again, we hear we must do something, but there's nothing we can do—at least anything that prevents anyone who wants one from easily acquiring a weapon of war. By the end of this national bloodletting, this sacrifice for freedom, there will be plenty of people in need of redemption.



Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io