Within a month, our country has been stricken by two devastating acts of terrorism. On the night of October 1, Stephen Paddock opened fire onto a crowd at a country festival in Las Vegas. It is currently the deadliest mass shooting in America, killing 58 people and leaving over 500 injured. October 31, in Manhattan, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov rented a Home Depot truck and drove it into a bike path, striking cyclists and pedestrians before colliding with a school bus. He killed 8 people and injured 12.
While many Americans have had overwhelming reactions to such grave acts, our president has had two very different reactions to each.
Regarding Las Vegas, Trump’s very first response came from Twitter. “My warmest condolences and sympathies to the victims and families of the terrible Las Vegas shooting. God bless you!” On October 3, he tweeted, “I am so proud of our great Country! God bless America!” In the days after, his tweets included statements about how his thoughts and prayers were with Las Vegas and that he would be visiting to pay his respects. His only tweet “condemning” Paddock—the shooter—simply stated, “It is a ‘miracle’ how fast the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police were able to find the demented shooter and stop him from even more killing!”
Later, Trump held a press conference in which he confronted the attack. In this meeting, President Trump addressed Paddock as “gunman” and “shooter” and the act itself as an “act of pure evil” and a “terrible, terrible attack.” Throughout all of his tweets and conferences, he never acknowledged Paddock as a terrorist, nor the attack as an act of domestic terrorism.
However, Mr. Trump’s response to the New York attack could not have been any more different. His immediate response on Twitter read, “NYC terrorist was happy as he asked to hang ISIS flag in his hospital room. He killed 8 people, badly injured 12. SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!” He furthers this statement in the tweets succeeding it, as well.
Within those tweets, Trump not only condemned the attacker as a terrorist right from the beginning, but he also held a very aggressive tone toward him. Whereas with the Las Vegas shooting, Trump showed sympathy for the victims, thanked the police department, and disregarded the attacker.
Furthermore, the Las Vegas attack lead to no further strides to improve gun control; many people pushing for stricter gun control after this attack were told that such tragedies were not the time to “politicize their agendas.” Yet immediately after the New York attack, Trump held multiple meetings to enforce stricter immigration laws. By their standards, is that not also politicizing a tragedy?
The blatant racism displayed by our president and his playing into the stereotype that only Muslims are terrorists is infuriating. Stephen Paddock carried out the deadliest mass shooting in American history, but was not once called a terrorist because he was a white man; he wasn’t even reprimanded by the president in the least. Yet when a Muslim man committed another act of terrorism—which was just as devastating but ultimately not as deadly—it was immediately acknowledged as such.
Domestic terrorism is still terrorism. What constitutes as terrorism does not depend on the color of one’s skin. It’s time we acknowledge these heinous acts for what they truly are and disregard race and religion as factors altogether.