Not surprisingly, last night’s terror attack in London led to President Trump unleashing another one of his patented weekend Twitter tirades:
WASHINGTON — President Trump assailed political correctness, gun control supporters and the mayor of London on Sunday, arguing that the world needed to be more serious about fighting terrorism a day after seven people were killed and dozens more wounded in the latest attack in Britain.
“We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people,” he wrote on Twitter. “If we don’t get smart it will only get worse.”
Mr. Trump targeted Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, scorning him for trying to reassure his people. “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’” Mr. Trump wrote.
The president’s post mischaracterized what Mr. Khan said about the attack. During an interview shown on the BBC, the mayor said he was “appalled and furious that these cowardly terrorists would target” innocent civilians and vowed that “we will never let them win, nor will we allow them to cower our city.”
He went on to say that residents should not worry as they encounter more police officers patrolling the streets. “Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days,” Mr. Khan said. “No reason to be alarmed. One of the things, the police, all of us need to do, is make sure we’re as safe as we possibly can be. I’m reassured that we are one of the safest global cities in the world, if not the safest global city in the world, but we always evolve and review ways to make sure that we remain as safe as we possibly can.”
Mr. Khan’s office later dismissed the president’s tweet, saying the mayor was too busy to reply. “He has more important things to do than respond to Donald Trump’s ill-informed tweet that deliberately takes out of context his remarks urging Londoners not to be alarmed when they saw more police — including armed officers — on the streets,” a spokesman for the mayor said in a statement.
A top aide to Mr. Trump added to the criticism of the mayor. Dan Scavino, the president’s director of social media, posted a message referring to Mr. Khan’s criticism of Mr. Trump a year ago for his “ignorant view of Muslims.”
On Saturday night and Sunday morning, in the hours after the attack, Mr. Trump sought to build support for his proposed travel ban on visitors from select Muslim-majority countries, which has been blocked by the courts, and argued that gun control was pointless because terrorists in this case used other weapons.
“Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now?” he wrote on Sunday morning. “That’s because they used knives and a truck!”
On Saturday night, he wrote: “We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”
Gun control advocates quickly noted that the casualty toll might have been much higher had the attackers had access to high-powered firearms. Britain has some of the world’s strictest regulations on private gun ownership.
(…)
It was not the first time a member of the Trump family criticized Mr. Khan, the first Muslim mayor of any major Western capital. In March, after a terrorist attack in London, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, posted a link to an article in Britain’s Independent newspaper from the previous September quoting Mr. Khan about terrorism.
“You have to be kidding me?!: Terror attacks are part of living in big city, says London Mayor Sadiq Khan,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote at the time.
Mr. Trump’s post left the impression that Mr. Khan was minimizing the importance of terrorist attacks. But in fact, he was saying that terrorism was a reality that a big city needed to be prepared to prevent and respond to vigorously.
“Part and parcel of living in a great global city is you’ve got to be prepared for these things, you’ve got to be vigilant, you’ve got to support the police doing an incredibly hard job,” Mr. Khan said.
“That means being vigilant, having a police force that is in touch with communities, it means the security services being ready, but it also means exchanging ideas and best practice,” Mr. Khan was quoted saying.
Here are Trump’s tweets in response to the attacks, in chronological order:
We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2017
Whatever the United States can do to help out in London and the U. K., we will be there – WE ARE WITH YOU. GOD BLESS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2017
We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people. If we don’t get smart it will only get worse
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2017
At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is “no reason to be alarmed!”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2017
Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That’s because they used knives and a truck!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2017
Much of what Trump says here, of course, is utter nonsense.
In the case of the first tweet, Trump is clearly seeking to use the death of six people to argue in favor of his Muslim Travel Ban, which is now pending before the Supreme Court for a review of the stay on its enforcement that was imposed by a Federal District Court Judge and upheld by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. One of the arguments that the Judges at both the District Court and the Court of Appeals relied on in their decisions is the fact that Trump’s rhetoric both before and after the campaign reinforce the idea that the real purpose of his Executive Orders was to bring into effect the campaign promise he made for a “complete ban” on any entry of Muslims into the United States as much a possible. Because of that rhetoric, the Courts found that there was sufficient reason to find that there was an unconstitutional discriminatory intent behind the Executive Orders to find them to be unconstitutional. Trump’s tweet last night just tends to reinforce that argument, especially since he refers to the Executive Orders as a “Travel Ban” even as his lawyers argue in Court that it’s not really a ban, but a lawful exercise of Presidential authority to temporarily halt immigration from selected countries based on clear and present threats to national security. The Supreme Court Justices have set a deadline of June 12th for the Plaintiffs challenging the ban to respond to the government’s request to lift the stay, and could rule at any time after that.
Additionally, Trump’s tweet ignores the fact that it’s quite likely that his travel ban would have done nothing to prevent the attacks that have plagued Great Britain over the past three months. While we don’t know anything yet about the attackers who carried out last night’s attack, we do know about the attackers in both the March car ramming incident in Westminster and the bombing in Manchester last month were committed by men who were born in the United Kingdom. As I said this morning, I suspect that the same will end up being true about the attackers in last night’s attack. The travel ban that Trump would seek to impose does not apply to American citizens, or to Permanent Residents (Green Card holders). Therefore, it would have done nothing to prevent those individuals from leaving the U.K. for one of the countries on the Trump’s list or from returning to the United States.
As for the rest of Trump’s tirade, it’s the same kind of irrational nonsense we’ve long come to expect from Trump dating back to before he was even a candidate for President. His attack on the Mayor of London is, as noted, based on a complete misrepresentation of what Mayor Sadiq Khan actually said in response to the attack, and his comments about gun control are just irrelevant and nonsensical. What’s more concerning, though, is his apparent dismissal of legitimate concerns about civil liberties in the context of responding to terror attacks. As former Presidential candidate Evan McMullin, who has become a vocal and frequent Trump critic since the election ended, put it, ISIS is a serious threat but so is a President who dismisses civil liberties concerns as mere “political correctness.” If this is any indication of what kind of response we would see from President Trump in the event of a terrorist attack here in the United States, then we ought to be deeply concerned about the future and his ability to handle a crisis. Of course, the fact that his first response to a terrorist attack is to get on Twitter and exploit the deaths of people who were merely out for some Saturday night fun for his own political purposes tells us all we need to know about how that would go. Be concerned, my friends, be very concerned.
