Mark Bogen, the vice mayor of Florida’s Broward County, said Friday that President Donald Trump’s expected visit with the victims of the Parkland school shooting is “absolutely absurd.”
“Him coming here is absolutely absurd, and he’s a hypocrite,” Bogen said of the President in an interview Friday with CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield. “How can you come here and talk about how horrible it is when you support these laws?”
The President on Thursday offered no indication he is willing to revisit the nation’s gun laws, instead emphasizing the mental health aspect of mass shootings. Last February, he signed a measure that revoked an Obama-era regulation, which required the Social Security Administration to disclose information to the national gun background check system about certain people with mental illness on a quarterly basis. It’s unclear, however, if that measure would have prevented Wednesday’s shooting.
“So President Trump now, based on his actions, allows mentally ill people to purchase guns when over a year ago they could not,” Bogen said.
Bogen argued that Trump is a hypocrite because he supports the purchasing of assault weapons, “and then comes down here and wants to act as though this is horrible, and this shouldn’t happen, but goes back to Washington and supports it.”
“It is hypocrisy, it is absolute hypocrisy,” Bogen said.
Trump announced on Twitter Friday morning that he’ll be leaving for Florida later to “meet with some of the bravest people on earth – but people whose lives have been totally shattered.”