Trump response to New Zealand massacre highlights his combative history with Muslims

Trump a Christian who is Super Muslim Hater




the Washington Post

Trump response to New Zealand massacre highlights his combative history with Muslims

After a gunman left 50 dead in an anti-Muslim massacre at two mosques in New Zealand, President Trump did not condemn the white supremacy extolled by the alleged shooter, nor did he express explicit sympathy with Muslims around the globe.

Instead, Trump spent the days that followed on the offensive — averaging just over a tweet per hour through the weekend as he decried various subjects, from unflattering television coverage to the late Republican senator John McCain. One of his few public defenders, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, took to the airwaves with an unusual declaration that “the president is not a white supremacist.”

In a broader planning meeting, administration officials briefly considered holding a roundtable featuring persecuted religious minorities — Muslims, as well as Christians and Jews — but the idea was scuttled when the group decided they couldn’t pull off such an event on short notice, a White House official said.

By Monday morning, Trump still had not heeded the plea of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern — whom he spoke with on the phone Friday — to offer his nation’s “sympathy and love for all Muslim communities.” But the president had contorted himself into a victim of the tragedy, griping on Twitter: “The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible attack in New Zealand.”

Trump’s tepid response to the New Zealand massacre has highlighted the president’s fraught and combative relationship with Islam and Muslims, which dates back at least to his campaign. Throughout his presidential bid and his presidency, Trump has made statements and enacted policies that many Muslim Americans and others find offensive and upsetting at best — and dangerous and Islamophobic at worst.

In a lengthy manifesto, the admitted shooter, a white man from Australia, described Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose” and seemed to echo some of the U.S. president’s hard-line rhetoric on immigration, describing immigrants as “invaders within our lands.”

In response to a reporter’s question Friday, Trump said he did not view white nationalism as a rising threat around the world — despite evidence to the contrary. “I don’t really,” he said. “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess.”

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A February report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center found 1,020 hate groups across the United States in 2018 — an all-time high — as well as an increase in the death toll tied to the radical right, with white supremacists in the United States and Canada killing at least 40 people.

“What I’ve seen in the right wing — people who haven’t been as engaged in the political system until Trump came along, they really are taking his language very seriously,” said Mohamed Elibiary, a Texas Republican and Muslim who has served as a homeland security expert for the U.S. government. “He is promoting this nostalgic vision of America. He is always getting us to look backwards.”

The White House was quick to dismiss any suggestion that Trump should be connected to the massacre or the alleged attacker. In an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Monday morning, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, urged the public and the media to read the entire manifesto, noting that Trump’s name is mentioned only “one time.”

Mulvaney, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, also rejected “this idea that every time something bad happens everywhere around the world, folks who don’t like Donald Trump seem to blame it on Donald Trump.”

Yet the president has a long history of disparaging Muslims and other minorities, while simultaneously refusing to forcefully condemn white supremacy and violent nationalism. After a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 left a woman dead, for instance, Trump held a freewheeling news conference in which he said “both sides” were to blame.

“In the Republican Party, we’ve already had folks who liked to play footsie with the bigotry, but when it came to serious moments, they would tighten up their language, they would be careful not to be seen or misconstrued as overtly bigoted,” Elibiary said. “We haven’t traditionally had presidents go to the well of white-identity grievances, at least not in my lifetime. I haven’t seen a president try to hit those hot-button issues about us versus them.”