Trump’s ‘I told you so’ moment: How massacre changes campaign

The sorrow and horror of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando quickly gave way to presidential politics Sunday, with both Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton pushing their own views of the tragedy.

For Trump, who has often talked about barring Muslims from entering the country, the news that 29-year-old Omar Mateen, the U.S.-born son of Afghan immigrants, had walked into the Florida nightspot and gunned down 50 people was an “I told you so” moment.

“Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism,” he said in a tweet Sunday.

For Clinton, it was the fact that Mateen, who was shot dead by police, reportedly used an assault-style weapon in the massacre that caught her political eye.

While it may be appear more than a bit unseemly to use a national tragedy for political purposes, there’s nothing particularly new about it.

Just look at the GOP’s effort to bind Clinton — and her presidential hopes — to the 2012 deaths of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

The mass shooting in Orlando, and the circumstances around it, are just too much for any politician to ignore, said Jessica Levinson, a political analyst and law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

For Trump, still drawing criticism for his suggestion earlier this month that a judge born in Indiana of Mexican immigrant parents couldn’t fairly preside over his California civil trial, any chance to change the subject is welcome.

The Orlando killings allow the New York businessman to try to reach for the moral high ground, changing his calls for tough restrictions on Muslims both inside and outside the country from a question of race to one of national security.

President Obama, speaking from the White House on Sunday afternoon, called the shootings “an act of terror and an act of hate,” and said the shooter was “a person filled with hatred.”

Clinton and her Democratic backers, who have dismissed Trump’s anti-Muslim measures as little more than overt racism, were forced to take a more nuanced — and less actively aggressive — approach to the Orlando killings.

The dueling campaign messages over what the massacre means are “not going to swing the undecided, but only confirm what each side’s people already believe.”

The political wrangling after the Orlando shootings also opened a way for others to explore some of the less savory areas of modern American politics.

Patrick, who has been described by Josh Earnest, Obama’s press secretary, as “a right-wing radio host elected to public state office,” is loudly opposed to both same-sex marriage and allowing transgender people to use gender-appropriate restrooms.