Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) has an absurd theory about how displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms could have prevented last weekend’s shooting of former President Donald Trump.
During a Thursday interview with Nexstar Media at the Republican National Convention, Landry justified using taxpayer dollars to defend his state from lawsuits after it passed new legislation requiring copies of the biblical commandments to appear in every public classroom in Louisiana.
Landry said that backing the mandate is an “extremely easy” decision, asking Nexstar: “If the Supreme Court has something wrong, why would you not want that to be corrected? What is the price you would pay to correct that?”
The GOP governor also defended the religious rules, which appear in the Torah and the Old Testament, saying, “I didn’t know it was a bad way to live your life.”
Then, his argument veered into an outlandish hypothetical.
“Maybe if the Ten Commandments were hanging” inside the Trump shooter’s school, “maybe he wouldn’t have taken a shot at the president,” Landry said.
Circling back to the legal costs of Louisiana’s Ten Commandment policy, Landry added, “It’s a price that I’m glad to pay to hopefully keep kids out of crime, to reduce violence and to bring some civility back to the country.”
Twenty-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired upon a Trump rally Saturday in Pennsylvania before he was killed by the Secret Service. The former president was wounded; one rally attendee was killed and two others were injured.
While law enforcement is working to figure out what may have motivated Crooks’ attempt on Trump’s life, little information has emerged publicly about the would-be assassin’s personal interests or political ideology.
However, authorities reportedly discovered that he had conducted online searches for information about both Trump and President Joe Biden, as well as information about major depressive disorder.