On Friday, The Washington Posteditorial board issued a stark rebuke against President Donald Trump's handling of the New Zealand massacre.
A mass shooting at two New Zealand mosques left 49 people dead, and several injured. The shooter released a manifesto that was filled with hateful ideologies towards immigrants and Muslim.
"The alleged gunman’s garden-variety racism — his rantings about the peril posed to whites faced with 'replacement' by Muslims — is of a piece with other hatreds espoused by other racist killers in other places and times," the editorial said.
The editorial explained that Trump is not to blame for the shooting, but called him out for his poor example of condemning hate.
"President Trump is not to blame for the tragedy, despite his own history of Islamophobic statements and a travel ban that targets predominantly Muslim nations," they wrote.
"Still, he should go further than he has; for starters, by condemning the alleged killer, whose nativist rhetoric — he called immigrants 'invaders,' attacked 'mass immigration' and wrote that he hoped to 'directly reduce immigration rates' — overlaps with the president’s own," the editorial said.
The editorial then listed multiple examples of when the president failed to speak out against the rise of white nationalism -- which he believes is not actually on the rise.
"Mr. Trump, who could not bring himself to criticize the white nationalists in Charlottesville who chanted that minorities (Jews, in that case) would 'not replace us,' on Friday said he doesn’t regard white nationalism as a problem. That’s the wrong message. Instead, he ought to state unambiguously that the New Zealand suspect’s 'replacement' ideology is an unacceptable trope in civilized discourse," the editorial said.
Read the full editorial here.
