Two days after a mosque in Minnesota was bombed, officials for the religious center are wondering why Donald Trump has yet to utter a single syllable about the attack.
As BuzzFeed reported on Monday, the mosque’s executive director, Mohamed Omar, is asking Trump to visit the center and denounce the attack – even though the President of the United States should volunteer to do that on his own.
“He is the president of this country, and this happened to us,” Omar said. “He has to come here and at least express his feelings and say this is bad.”
Another official, Asad Zaman of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, said this, according to BuzzFeed: “We are wondering why President Trump has not tweeted about this. He seems to want to tweet about security and terror issues.”
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As Zaman noted in his remarks, Trump has never shied away from exploiting terrorist attacks, sometimes even as they happen.
In an earlier tweet this year, the president had no problem attacking Muslims after an attack in Paris.
A new radical Islamic terrorist has just attacked in Louvre Museum in Paris. Tourists were locked down. France on edge again. GET SMART U.S.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2017
The difference, of course, between the Minnesota attack and the incidents Trump likes to tweet about is that Muslims were the victim. That doesn’t comport with the president’s narrative that all terrorist acts are carried out by Muslims. In Trump’s eyes, those who practice Islam couldn’t possibly be the victims of such violence, even as anti-Muslim hate crimes continue to be on the rise in the age of Trump.
It’s also not as if Trump doesn’t have the time to release some type of statement about the recent attack. Not only is he currently in the midst of a 17-day vacation in Bedminster, New Jersey, but he unloaded a series of tweets this morning, attacking the media, polls, and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
Would it have killed the president to sneak in a tweet about an “act of terrorism” that occurred over the weekend in Minnesota?
For a guy who has fought to ban Muslims from the country and has repeatedly denigrated and isolated those who practice Islam, both at home and abroad, Trump’s silence is certainly not surprising.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
