CDC Shooting Not the Kind of Crime Trump Cares About

On August 3, Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, famed as the teenage mascot of Elon Musk’s DOGE assault on the federal bureaucracy, got badly beaten up during an attempted carjacking in Washington, D.C. President Trump reacted with a wild and angry screed threatening to federalize the D.C. government. Then on August 11, Trump followed through with a wild and angry press conference in which he quite literally fabricated a violent-crime wave in Washington to justify a takeover of the local police force and the deployment of National Guard units.

On August 8, as Team Trump planned this little coup, a more violent crime than Coristine’s beating unfolded in Atlanta as a shooter, apparently inspired by anti-vaxx propaganda, fired 180 rounds of ammunition at four headquarters buildings of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A police officer, David Rose, was killed in the barrage. The suspected shooter, Patrick Joseph White, killed himself after fleeing the crime scene. According to family and friends, White was all but possessed by fears about the supposedly dire effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, as NBC News reported:

Authorities had recovered “written documentation that expressed the shooter’s discontent with the COVID-19 vaccinations” from White’s home.

A neighbor of White’s previously told NBC News that White had expressed anti-vaccine sentiments to her on multiple occasions. It was also previously reported that White blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal.

For CDC employees, the violence felt inevitable and punctuated a long and difficult year in which they’ve felt targeted and demonized by the administration they work for, as the Washington Post observed:

Days after the shooting, the initial shock has morphed into anger for many CDC employees, according to interviews with more than a dozen of them, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation …

They said they are fed up with how they and their work are being derided and impugned by conservatives and anti-vaccine activists, including the one who rose to lead the nation’s public health apparatus: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Before joining the government, Kennedy falsely called the coronavirus vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made” and said it contained a “poison” …

Now the nation’s top health official, Kennedy has moved to limit the use of coronavirus vaccines, fired the CDC’s vaccine advisers and last week canceled research into the mRNA technology that made those vaccines’ rapid development possible, citing misleading or false claims.

Kennedy did visit the site of the shootings earlier this week, and he expressed concern for the “CDC family,” though a spokesman for the union that represents CDC workers wasn’t impressed:

The union criticized Kennedy following his visit, saying, “He spent less time on the ground than the attacker did.” They called for improved communication, as well as stepped up security, including 24/7 perimeter armed guards across campuses, installation of bulletproof glass, weapon detection measures and more extensive evacuation planning. 

The CDC employees who spoke to CBS News said they expect more from the health secretary, hoping he would condemn the rhetoric that they believe led to the shooting.

Not much chance of that. But at least Kennedy showed up and mouthed the appropriate pieties. His boss, the crime-obsessed 47th president, hasn’t said a thing about this attack on a federal facility.

Presumably, a crime that raises questions about the ongoing national epidemic of gun violence and the murderous rage associated with vaccine disinformation and anti-government rhetoric isn’t of interest to the Crime-Fighter-in-Chief. It’s also entirely possible that Trump highlighted the Coristine beating only as the pretext for the D.C. power grab he might have been planning for years. Exploiting fears of violent crime to score political points has been a habit of Trump’s dating all the way back to his days of inflaming racial tensions in the case of the Central Park Five, who were falsely accused of assault and rape. He’s no more likely to change his ways than his secretary of Health and Human Services is likely to change his mind about lifesaving vaccines.