From behind a podium in a room reserved for the most important of presidential addresses, President Donald Trump said immigrants in a caravan trying to cross the U.S. southern border seeking asylum constituted “an invasion.” He further told the nation there were some “tough” people in the caravan—which may or may not have been funded by George Soros, he alleged—who attacked Mexican police and threw rocks at them. The president said having a rock thrown at you was like being shot at, so he planned to instruct U.S. military troops, called upon to fight the “invasion,” that someone aiming a rock at them needs to provoke the same response as having a rifle pointed at them. Audible gasps resounded across the press corps at this pronouncement.

Never mind the fact that he used the Roosevelt Room to make a political statement on the eve of the midterm elections. The ghosts of Kent State turned over in their graves and the next day, in Nigeria, the military cited Trump’s declaration as justification for slaughtering innocent civilians. Trump added to his narrative while walking out on the South Lawn and declared the fake media was causing violence.

A little more than a week prior, Maurice Stallard, the father of Louisville mayor Greg Fischer’s chief equity officer, found himself in a local grocery store shopping for poster board for his 12-year-old grandson. The 69-year-old Stallard was a military veteran and retired GE employee. “He had a great laugh. Great family man,” one of his cousins later said. While Stallard and his grandson walked into the Jeffersontown Kroger store, 67-year-old Vickie Lee Jones, known as a woman with a “warm and giving heart,” drove to the same upper-middle-class shopping center in one of the most diverse, affluent suburbs of Louisville. Stallard didn’t know Jones. They only had two things in common that day: They went shopping at the same Kroger store and they were both black.

The foreign policies of the United States over the last 35 years has produced the refugees we now refuse.

At the same time, Gregory Bush, a white man with mental problems who heavily identified with President Trump’s politics, pulled up to the First Baptist Church in Jeffersontown. A church member sitting in his car in the adjacent parking lot saw Bush pulling on the doors and banging on the church trying to get inside. “An hour and a half earlier, we had 70 people in the church,” church administrator Billy Williams told reporters. “But by the time he came through all doors were locked and there were probably eight or 10 still in the building.”

Frustrated, Bush left. His next stop was the Jeffersontown Kroger. The Kroger is a super-store with a wide variety of goods beyond the range offered by most groceries. Stallard and his grandson were in the Hallmark section of the store, nestled in the furthest corner of the store from the entry. Bush found them there.

According to witnesses, he shot Stallard in his back and, as the man sprawled out on the ground, Bush came up behind him and pumped four more slugs into the dying man’s head. His 12-year-old grandson ran in fear. Screams could be heard and people began fleeing the store with Stallard’s grandson. Sarah, a Kroger employee, said she found a woman in an aisle looking at baskets or boxes to purchase. “Ma’am, we’re asking everyone to leave the store,” she told the woman. The woman brushed her off twice. Finally, Sarah said, she told the woman, “There’s an active shooter in the store and you need to leave.” She said the woman told her, “I heard the shots. I’m from Chicago. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Others were not so stoic. A woman identifying herself as Robin said she heard the gunshots as she approached the store and saw Bush leaving the store after the shooting. There, police say he got into a gun battle with a “good guy with a gun,” who had a conceal and carry permit. They exchanged gunfire without hitting anything and Bush reportedly screamed out, “Whites don’t kill whites.” At that time, Jones was walking to the Kroger and apparently didn’t see or understand the mayhem erupting around her. That’s when Bush allegedly shot her in the back, killing her, before fleeing the scene.

Stallard’s grandson, who witnessed the shooting, fled and ran across a busy highway according to some witnesses. Enzo Palombino apparently heard the boy’s cries for help, grabbed his hand and took him to his car. “We’re on the phone just trying to get ahold of his mom, and I could just see the fear in his face,” Palombino told reporters. “And I’m holding him the whole time.” Palombino said the boy’s screaming and yelling still replays in his head.

Kroger employees, left behind to clean up the blood, were traumatized by what they saw. Grief counselors were called in and just two days before Trump accused the media of fomenting violence, the employees at Kroger and the loved ones of the dead told a different story. “I don’t want to point fingers at the president, but a lot of people have signed on to the mentality…that it is okay to be hateful in public,” said Kevin Gunn,Jones nephew. “We’re all the same inside,” he added.

” We should never forget the violence this president is responsible for fomenting and we owe it to each other to find a way to disagree without the vitriol.”

The Kroger where the shooting occurred was farmland less than a generation ago. As the east end of Louisville exploded, Jeffersontown, once a remote bedroom community for the largest city in the bluegrass state became an enclave for a diverse and vibrant middle class. Shoppers at the Kroger less than a week after the shooting represent a microcosm of our country. Mixed-race couples shopped alongside people wearing gay pride pins. The elderly, the handicapped, white, black, Hispanic, Asian walked down the aisles of the store along with law enforcement, fire department personnel, first responders, doctors, men and women in business attire and multiple children looking for last-minute Halloween treats and costumes.

After the death of Washington Postreporter Jamal Khashoggi, numerous bomb threats and the death of 11 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the shooting In Louisville’s suburbs is a story that, while horrifying, pales in comparison to the rest of the violence prevalent during the Trump administration.

On Friday, Trump had more campaign stops on his agenda and left the White House in the early afternoon. In the new normal of today’s White House, there are few if any briefings by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and they are not missed by the press corps. Instead we are gathered behind ropes outside the Oval Office and Trump will, more often than not, walk up to the rope line and take shouted questions from those who care to suffer the humiliation of waiting like fan girls bunched behind sanctions and velvet ropes.

When I asked him to clarify his statement about seemingly giving the U.S. military permission to shoot refugees, he backed up quickly and said he just wants the military to arrest them. Of course, there’s the question of the Posse Comitatus Act which keeps the military from doing that, but in so much as John Bennett of Roll Call and I were both told by White House staffers they’d get back to us on the “Hakuna Matata thing” of the Posse Comitatus Act, I didn’t actually expect Trump to understand what I was asking.

I did, however, expect him to understand and respond to my question regarding the fact that it is the foreign policies of the United States over the last 35 years that has produced the refugees we now refuse. He didn’t answer that. Then, when an ABC reporter asked if his rhetoric was contributing to violence, Trump brazenly turned on the reporter and blamed the “fake news” for promoting violence. I got angry. I admit it.

I said, “How? How?” at least two or three times and then went after Trump, “How is it that you’re not contributing to the violence?” He wouldn’t answer. Then he told me “no more questions” as I had “too many.” I kept asking anyway.

But the joy for Trump in a scrum on the South Lawn versus a formal news conference or something in the briefing room is he can pretend he didn’t hear me and move on to other reporters (which he did). When he finished, he apparently left, but really had only turned a corner and began answering questions from other reporters and talking about his economic numbers. So, I popped up again and asked about those who said he’s inciting violence with his rhetoric. He turned and sneered at me, but still didn’t answer the question. Then he was off. He walked away. It was time for more campaign stops. The facts? They don’t matter to Trump.

But for Stallard, Jones, the 11 killed at a synagogue and the 12-year-old traumatized grandson of a loving grandfather shot and senselessly murdered, facts do count. Trump uses his disdain for the media as a dog whistle to rally his troops while the real issues go largely ignored. But we should never forget the violence this president is responsible for fomenting and we owe it to each other to find a way to disagree without the vitriol. Meanwhile, the midterms are upon us, and Mueller waits in the wings.