Trump Attacks ‘Fake News Media’ Over Suggestions His Coddling of White Supremacy Contributed to Massacre

President Trump has found the real victim of the horrible massacre in New Zealand, and that victim is President Trump.

During his Monday morning “executive time” the president posted this gem to Twitter:

The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible attack in New Zealand. They will have to work very hard to prove that one. So Ridiculous!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2019

It is actually not that hard. Donald Trump’s years of rhetoric demonizing Muslims, trying to ban them from entering the United States, flip suggestions that we should “bomb the hell out of ISIS” with zero regard for the number of Muslim civilians who would be killed along with members of the terrorist group, and his coddling of and tacit support for white supremacists like the ones who marched in Charlottesville in 2017, all contributed to an environment in which a disaffected young white man and self-described racist who views the president as “a symbol of renewed white identity” came to see Muslim immigration as a threat to Western, majority-white nations, and believed that the only way to get rid of the threat was to eradicate it.

Donald Trump is certainly not solely responsible for the massacre in New Zealand. But as the leader of the free world, his words and actions carry great weight. He is too narcissistic to recognize that fact. So he spent his Monday morning taking personal offense that anyone would suggest he bears any responsibility for the massacre, rather than sparing a thought for the victims or reflecting on how he, the most well-known person on the planet, might set a better example for others.

There, that wasn’t so hard.