US President Donald Trump on Monday told a nation mourning 31 people killed in two mass shootings that he rejected racism and white supremacist ideology, moving to blunt criticism that his divisive rhetoric fuels violence.
As flags flew at half mast at the White House and across the country and the death toll edged up by two, Trump offered an unusually direct condemnation of racists as he took on the role of consoler-in-chief, which he is expected to reprise during a visit to Texas on Wednesday.
But as the country tried to digest weekend shootings at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas that left 22 dead and another in which nine victims were slain outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio, Trump offered little in the way of new ideas for a country awash with guns and painfully accustomed to mass shootings.
“Our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” Trump said.
He stressed that mental illness was the main culprit fueling mass shootings in America, as opposed to the ready availability of firearms or extremist thinking.
But in a rare intervention in political matters, former president Barack Obama said divisive rhetoric from US leaders was part of the problem.
“We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments,” Obama said in a statement.
El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said Monday that one German, 13 Americans, seven Mexicans and one as yet unidentified person were killed.
Mexico’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, condemned the massacre as an “act of terrorism” against his country’s nationals, saying that eight, not seven, had died and releasing their names.
At the sites of America’s latest mass shootings — numbers 250 and 251 so far this year — people came to honor the dead.
On Twitter Saturday, Trump described the El Paso attack as “an act of cowardice.”
But critics said the president’s habit of speaking in derogatory terms about immigrants is pushing hatred of foreigners into the political mainstream and encouraging white supremacism.
“To pretend that his administration and the hateful rhetoric it spreads doesn’t play a role in the kind of violence that we saw yesterday in El Paso is ignorant at best and irresponsible at worst,” said the Southern Poverty Law Center, a major civil rights group.
AFP
