It doesn’t seem to matter how far removed President Donald Trump is from a situation, if the media have the opportunity to spin a story in their favor — all in an effort to disparage the president — they will take it because they either have an agenda or it’s just easier when they have no real argument.
White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney joined Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Sunday to talk about the grasping-at-straws accusations that Trump was the inspiration for the New Zealand shooter that maniacally killed 50 people at two mosques last week. The shooter mentioned Trump in his manifesto, but also disagreed with the president’s politics since his mission was to start, at the very least, an ideological civil war in the U.S.
Throughout the interview, Wallace disingenuously played and displayed heavily edited clips and quotes from both Trump and the shooter, attempting to connect Trump to the shooter in some way.
Wallace displayed an out-of-context excerpt from the shooter’s manifesto in which he wrote that he supports Trump in the sense that, in his demented view, Trump is a “symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” However, as Mulvaney will note, Wallace left out a pretty significant part of the shooter’s manifesto where he vehemently disagrees with the Trump’s policies.
Mulvaney immediately countered with the following:
I'm a little disappointed you [Wallace] didn't put up the next sentence, which the next sentence, because I looked it up last night was, 'What about for his policies and as a leader?’ And he said, ‘Dear God, no.' I don't think it is fair to cast this person as a supporter of Donald Trump, any more than it is to look at his, sort of, 'eco-terrorist' passages in that manifesto and align him with Nancy Pelosi or Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. This was a disturbed individual, an evil person. And to sit there and try and tie him to an American politician of either party probably ignores some of the deeper difficulties this sort of activity exposes.
While Wallace did admit that the shooter is the only person responsible for the shooting that happened in New Zealand, only after Mulvaney's response, he then pivoted to “some critics” notion that Trump “contributes to anti-Muslim climate.”
Wallace then played an incredibly out-of-context clip where then-candidate Trump posed the theory that “Islam hates us [the U.S.]” before displaying a critical tweet from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.
Here’s the tweet:
Time and time again, this president has embraced and emboldened white supremacists—and instead of condemning racist terrorists, he covers for them. This isn't normal or acceptable. We have to be better than this. https://t.co/pniU3l0wte
— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) March 15, 2019
Wallace followed up by asking Mulvaney whether Trump has considered “giving a major speech condemning anti-Muslim, white supremacist bigotry.”
Is this CNN? I figured virtue-signaling was their thing.
“The president is not a white supremacist. I’m not sure how many times we have to say that," Mulvaney told Wallace. "To simply ask the question every time something happens overseas or even domestically, to say, 'oh my goodness, it must somehow be the president’s fault,' speaks to a politicization of everything that I think is undermining sort of the institutions that we have in the country today.”
For the full video of Mulvaney’s interview with Wallace, because context matters, watch below:
The shooter wrote his manifesto to upset as many people as possible, because — as I’ve said before — some people just want to watch the world burn. The shooter was crazy — yes, I said crazy — and should be viewed as nothing more than a maniac who wanted to see both sides of the political aisle at war with each other for his own amusement.
H/T: Real Clear Politics