WASHINGTON – Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday there’s no link between President Trump and the New Zealand shooter, a white supremacist who spouted anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Mulvaney’s comments came during a discussion on “Fox News Sunday” about the killer’s 74-page manifesto that called Trump a symbol of “renewed white identity and common purpose.”
Mulvaney said the attack that killed 50 people was a “terrible, evil, tragic act” carried out by a “disturbed individual.”
But Fox News’ Chris Wallace pressed him on previous comments Trump made, including “I think Islam hates us” during a CNN interview in 2016.
Trump also mentioned the “invasion of drugs and criminals” on Friday when he vetoed a congressional resolution blocking his emergency declaration to build a wall on the southern border.
Wallace asked if Trump has considered making a major speech “condemning anti-Muslim, white supremacist bigotry?” because of the criticism he has faced.
“The president is not a white supremacist. I’m not sure how many times we have to say that,” Mulvaney replied.
“And to simply ask the question every time something happens overseas or even domestically, to say, ‘oh my goodness, it must somehow be the president’s fault,’ speaks to a politicization of everything that I think is undermining sort of the institutions that we have in the country today,” Mulvaney added.
While Trump labeled the mosque killings “monstrous terror attacks,” he said he doesn’t view nationalism as a wide threat because “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”
On Sunday, Trump spent his morning defending Judge Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News host under fire for making anti-Muslim remarks about Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar.
On CBS’ “Face the Nation” Mulvaney said he wanted to “push back against this idea that every time something bad happens around the world folks who don’t like Donald Trump seem to blame it on Donald Trump.”
“Donald Trump isn’t more to blame for what happened in New Zealand than Mark Zuckerberg is cause he invented Facebook,” Mulvaney told “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan.
The killer had live-streamed the massacre at two mosques before the video was finally taken down.
Mulvaney said finger pointing is a waste of time.
“The issue is how do you stop these crazy people? Whether or not there’s one of them or four of them doesn’t make a difference if they’re willing to go on live TV and stream the murder of people. That’s where time is better spent,” he said. “Instead of worrying about who’s to blame – how do we stop [them] from doing this?”
Brennan also asked Mulvaney why the president wouldn’t directly address white supremacy and anti-Muslim hatred.
“The president communicates in his way, different presidents communicate in their way,” Mulvaney said. “I don’t think anybody can claim that Donald Trump hasn’t done exactly what we want to do in this circumstance.”
Some Democrats, however, found Trump’s response lacking.
“It is on the rise and the president should call it out but sadly he’s not doing that,” Sen. Tim Kaine said on “Face the Nation,” explaining that he believes there’s an uptick in “white supremacy, anti-immigrant [and] anti-Muslim attitudes.”
“The president uses language often that’s very similar to the language used by these bigots and racists,” Kaine continued.
He pointed to Trump labeling his southern border crisis an “invasion,” which he did in the Oval Office Friday as he vetoed Congress’ move to roll back his national emergency declaration.
“And he used the word invaders to characterize people coming to the nation’s southern borders which was exactly the same phrase that the shooter in New Zealand used to characterize the Muslims that he was attacking,” Kaine said. “That kind of language from the person who probably has the loudest microphone on the planet Earth is hurtful and dangerous and it tends to incite violence.”
Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu also criticized the president’s rhetoric.
“When he calls all Muslims terrorists, Mexicans rapists, African Americans criminals, he begins to judge people … based on race, creed, color, nation of origin, sexual orientation,” the Democrat said.
“At a minimum the president and the speaker of the House and everybody else in this country has to call that out for what it is and speak to it because it is viral and it will continue to get [worse],” Landrieu said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Speaking more broadly Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that “one of the most despicable things about President Trump’s campaign and his actions as president has been the way in which he has seen the divisions in our country and tried to crack them open more widely for his own partisan political advantage.”
But Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), a member of the president’s own party, said it was unfair to connect Trump to the New Zealand shooter.
“I have often disagreed with things the president has said and the things that he has tweeted,” Toomey said on “Meet the Press.” “But I think it’s a long way to attributing any kind of real link between what the president might say or tweet and the extraordinary type of madness that leads someone to massacre people in large numbers, whether it’s in Pittsburgh at a synagogue or whether it’s in New Zealand.”
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