President Donald Trump might be the worst person in the world, but that doesn’t mean he has to act like it. At some point, it would be nice if the president of the United States actually acted presidential, and if that means he must use Twitter, then maybe he could spend 20 seconds (assuming no one is proofreading his tweets) to send out his condolences or anger or something, anything, remotely acknowledging the bombing of a suburban Minneapolis mosque.
Early Saturday morning, an explosive device rocked the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minn. According to USA Today, although no one was injured in the attack, the explosive severely damaged the building that primarily serves people from the area’s large Somali community.
“What a terrible, dastardly, cowardly terrible act this was that was committed yesterday,” Gov. Mark Dayton said Sunday. “As someone said in the meeting, if the roles were reversed, it would be called a terrorist attack. And that’s what it is, an act of terrorism.”
And the governor is right, had the roles been reversed, the president of white supremacy would have used this to further his racist agenda under the guise of keeping white America safe. This president has never been about unity, and he isn’t even remotely trying to act as if he is.
Since the bombing, the president has tweeted about the so-called fake media and the opioid crisis (white-people crack), and issued this particularly petty series of tweets after an appearance by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on CNN, which Trump claims he doesn’t watch, except he totally watches it because he was live-tweeting during the interview and he’s a psychopathic narcissist.
“Silence on the part of public officials at the national level only serves to empower Islamophobes,” Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times.
“We are wondering why President Trump has not tweeted about this,” Asad Zaman, director of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, told BuzzFeed News. “He seems to want to tweet about security and terror issues.”
The president’s silence on this bombing has been deafening, and that’s just the way he wants it. It’s shocking to see a president openly hate and disregard American citizens whose lives have been directly impacted by hate. But this is what happens when cult followers listen to their leader: the orange man with the tiny fingers whose heart is black and can’t even make time to condemn the bombing of a place of worship on American soil.