Whatever else is produced by his first overseas trip as president, Donald Trump is getting an education on reacting to breaking news quite literally on the fly.
Trump’s first opportunity to respond to the horrific news of the suicide bombing in Manchester occurred in Bethlehem, literal birthplace of the Prince of Peace, and a place where he happened to be meeting with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. His response was a bit goofy (he repeatedly referred to the then-unknown perpetrators of the massacre as “evil losers,” presumably the worst insult he could think of) but did not mention “radical Islamic terrorism,” the term he kept insisting Barack Obama use — or even “Islam.”
After a visit to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, where he succeeded in appropriately confining his remarks to the Holocaust, Trump made some general statements of remorse about the Manchester attacks during an event with Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. There were no bursts of Trumpian wrath towards Muslims, immigrants, refugees, or weak-kneed liberals, either.
By the time Trump arrived in Italy today, in preparation for a series of meetings at the Vatican, his tweets were making the same kind of comments as Pope Francis, who called the Manchester atrocity “barbaric” and expressed “heartfelt solidarity with all those affected by this senseless act of violence.”
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