Trump Aide Gives a Repulsive Excuse for the White House's Silence on Mosque Bombing

It’s been three days since somebody threw a bomb through the window of the Al–Farooq Youth and Family Center in Bloomington, MN. In that time, President Donald Trump has attacked CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times and the Washington Post, mocked a senator’s military service, and retweeted Fox & Friends a lot.

What he hasn’t done, however, is utter a single word about the suspected hate crime attack. This is not surprising, given Trump’s Islamophobia, but it is still disgusting.

On Tuesday, White House official Sebastian Gorka—who, lest we forget, has been linked pretty directly to Nazis—appeared on MSNBC, where he offered this characteristically noxious explanation for the administration’s silence:

We’ve had a series of crimes committed—alleged hate crimes—by right wing individuals over the last six months that turned out to actually have been propagated by the left.

So let’s wait and see and allow the local authorities to provide their assessment and then the White House will make its comment.

As the MSNBC hosts noted, however, President Trump hasn’t been shy about jumping the gun when it comes to commenting on attacks in the past. To which Gorka replied that “well, sometimes an attack is unequivocally clear for what it is.”

This is, in fact, hardly the first time a seemingly religiously motivated attack on a Muslim community has drawn little—if any—White House response.

As for Gorka’s insistence that the White House should wait until “local authorities” provide their assessment? On Sunday, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton stated in no uncertain terms that the bombing was an “act of terrorism.”