regardless of whether authorities have even begun to investigate what actually took place. But when it comes to anti-Muslim hate crimes, Trump’s reactions are often halfhearted, delayed, or nonexistent.
There is perhaps no starker example of this than the president’s response to the terror events of last week: one in Portland, Oregon, in which two men died protecting two Muslim women who were being harassed by a ranting white supremacist; and one in London over the weekend, in which three terrorists murdered seven and wounded dozens more, armed with a van used to mow down pedestrians on London Bridge, and knives, wielded as instruments of destruction on innocent bystanders.
Trump declined to comment on the killings in Portland for days. Yet he spoke out almost immediately about London, sending out tweet after tweet railing against political correctness and calling for a tough response.
This wasn’t just a one-off, either — rather, it’s part of a disturbing pattern of Trump’s apparent reluctance to condemn anti-Muslim violence while reflexively condemning violence purportedly carried out by Muslims.
The responses to terror of any sort from American presidents traditionally have had a certain consistency of message and of meaning. In the past, presidents have appealed to our greater humanity, to rationality, to our understanding that more unites us than divides us. Traditionally, too, presidents have appealed to communities for calm.
Trump doesn’t do any of that. He sometimes does the opposite.
Trump typically reacts immediately to reports of Muslim terror attacks
When a gunman opened fire on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016, destroying lives in the space of minutes, Trump was quick to label the incident as terrorism. Then, with 50 dead and families across the region mourning, he congratulated himself for recognizing terrorism when it had taken place.
“That looks like another Islamic disaster," he said the day after the attack, on an AM radio program hosted by Mike Slater . He continued:
You look at this horrible terrorism that's going all over the place, and we have to be vigilant and we have to be smart. We can't allow ourselves to be just decimated. And I have friends that are Muslims, they are very nice people, but they understand there's a big problem. We have a big problem.
But Trump has also used the label of terror to address events as they are taking place, before others have determined exactly what’s going on.
Last Thursday, when reports of an attack in Manila were unfolding in the moments before the president’s Rose Garden speech on the Paris climate agreement, he spoke out about terrorism in the Philippines — before confirming if it was, in fact, terrorism (it turns out it wasn’t).
“I would like to begin by addressing the terrorist attack in Manila,” he told those assembled. “We’re closely monitoring the situation, and I will continue to give updates if anything happens during this period of time. But it is really very sad as to what’s going on throughout the world with terror. Our thoughts and our prayers are with all of those affected.”
When news first began to break on Saturday evening of a horrifying, chaotic scene unfolding in central London, Trump immediately retweeted an alarmist report from the Drudge Report, a conservative news aggregation website, about the “terror attack” — which at that point had not actually been confirmed as a terror attack. Even after his tweet went out, British Prime Minister Theresa May was still calling the incident a “potential” act of terror.
And when it turns out that the president’s supposition that terror has been committed is correct — as in the case with London— Trump is almost unstoppable in his ire, in his determination to be heard and to have the fact of terror’s existence legitimate and justify both a worldview and policy positions.
The humanity of the situation, of victims, and of the affected communities, appears as afterthought — quite literally.
Trump used his first tweet about the attack not to offer condolences to the victims or to offer solidarity to the country, but rather to justify his controversial travel ban.
The next day, he followed that tweet offering support to London and the UK by flinging vitriol at the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, taking a quote from Khan out of context, seemingly in order to make Khan look inept:
Khan actually said, “Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days. No reason to be alarmed.” Trump cherry-picked a single phrase pulled from a completely benign statement from a London leader trying to offer words of calm to the public in order to underwrite his own ideology.
For the record, here was Khan’s response to the 2016 terror attack in Orlando, Florida:
If the idea of using such a moment, and such a bully pulpit, to promote tolerance, peace, or, at the very least, calm,occurred to Trump at all, it was not the impulse he acted on.
Indeed, the London attack has prompted tweet after tweet from the president, each offering an aggressive display of certainty and thinly veiled attacks on a single community.
