Trump Says He’ll Meet with the ‘Bravest People on Earth’

President Donald Trump said Friday that he will meet later in the day with victims of the mass school shooting in Florida.

“I will be leaving for Florida today to meet with some of the bravest people on earth — but people whose lives have been totally shattered. Am also working with Congress on many fronts,” he tweeted.

Deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley, in an appearance earlier Friday on “The Laura Ingraham Show,” was not ready to make a formal announcement regarding Trump’s plans to meet with the families of the 17 victims of Wednesday’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

“He’s grieving for these families, and you want to do something,” he said. “At the same time, as we all know, when the president — if he ever were to come visit a place, it obviously takes resources needed for other things … You gotta be careful when you would go visit, how this would go.”

[lz_third_party includes=https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964509154357411840]

Gidley brushed aside media criticism of Trump’s address to the nation on Thursday.

“That’s predictable,” he said.

Gidley praised Trump’s Thursday speech to the nation.

“It was eloquent,” he said. “It was the healer-in-chief. It was someone who was trying to unify this country.”

The White House deputy press secretary also blasted the Senate for failing to pass Trump’s favored immigration reform, which would have granted amnesty to 1.8 million illegal immigrants whose parents brought them to America as children. He accused Republican senators who rallied around a rival amnesty bill pushed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) of voting without even knowing the details of the legislation.

“They had no idea what was in the bill,” he said. “They admitted they had not looked in the bill. Instead, they had just [read] off the press release given to them, delivered by Schumer, [Sen. Mike] Rounds and [Sen. Susan] Collins. They didn’t touch on the fact that the bill gave amnesty to 3.3 million people at a minimum.”

Added Gidley, “The bill was completely horrible, a nonstarter in the House, and it made this country less safe.”

None of the four immigration proposals offered Thursday reached the 60-vote threshold needed to break a Senate filibuster.

Gidley also defended the Department of Homeland Security from criticism leveled at it by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) at a news conference on Thursday. Responding to a critique of the bill published by the agency, Graham said it appeared that a “political hack” had written it — and then added that he found out the author was the former press secretary of ex-Rep. Tom Tancredo, an immigration hard-liner from Colorado.

Graham lumped in Tancredo with White House domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller.

“As long as Steve Miller’s running the White House and Tom Tancredo [is] in charge of DHS, we’re going nowhere fast, at warp speed,” he said. “You got the two most extreme characters in the town running the show. What do you expect?”

Related: ‘Give Comfort and Empathy to Any Child Who Is Frightened’

Gidley said the senator should have heeded the advice of the professionals at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“This PR war that Lindsey Graham is waging against staff members, at DHS, people who … [spend their] careers protecting our borders and then attacking people here at the White House, is not helping the situation whatsoever.”

As for Democrats, Gidley said, they are determined not to give Trump a political win.

“They are hell-bent on preventing this president from fixing any of the problems that they basically created over the last 30 years,” he said. “Their hatred for him clouds, or I guess outweighs, their love for this country.”

PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.

(photo credit, homepage and article images: Donald J. Trump… [1], [2], CC BY-SA 2.0, by Michael Vadon)