The Washington Post editorial board on Friday called out President Donald Trump’s response to the mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Trump responded to the attack, in which an alleged white supremacist gunman killed at least 49 people, by claiming that he didn’t see white nationalism as a rising threat around the world.
“That’s the wrong message,” the Post’s board wrote in the op-ed. “Instead, he ought to state unambiguously that the New Zealand suspect’s ‘replacement’ ideology is an unacceptable trope in civilized discourse.”
The board also noted in the piece that Trump “is not to blame for the tragedy, despite his own history of Islamophobic statements and a travel ban that targets predominantly Muslim nations.”
But it called for him to “go further than he has” by “condemning the alleged killer, whose nativist rhetoric” in his manifesto “overlaps with the president’s own.”
Read The Washington Post’s full editorial here.