Mark Wilson / Getty Images
- After a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, was apparently inspired by white supremacy, Ivanka Trump said on Twitter that the ideology is a form of terrorism, and must be destroyed.
- The man thought to have been behind the El Paso attack has been linked to a racist document posted to the message board 8chan, calling his planned shooting "a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas."
- In his response to the shooting, and a second attack in Dayton, Ohio, President Donald Trump, avoided discussing ideology.
- He described the El Paso gunman, as well as the shooter in a separate attack in Dayton, Ohio, as "really very seriously mentally ill."
- President Trump has been criticized before for his responses to violence by white nationalists, including after a march in Charlottesville, Virginia, which turned violent.
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After a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, was shown to likely be inspired by white supremacy, Ivanka Trump called the ideology a type of terrorism, and "an evil that must be destroyed."
Meanwhile, the response by her father, President Donald Trump, focused on the shooting, and a similar massacre in Dayton, Ohio, as an issue of mental health.
In a tweet on Sunday Ivanka Trump wrote: "White supremacy, like all other forms of terrorism, is an evil that must be destroyed."
Communities in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, were rocked on Sunday by two shootings, which left a total 29 people dead.
Her father, President Donald Trump, told reporters earlier that day that both shooters were "really very seriously mentally ill."
Joel Angel Juarez/AFP/Getty Images
Shortly before a gunman opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso on Sunday, an anti-immigrant document was posted to the online message board 8chan which promised "a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas."
Mark Lambie/The El Paso Times via Associated Press
A Justice Department official said on Sunday that officials are treating the El Paso shooting as a "domestic terrorist" case.
The motive of the Ohio attacker is not yet clear.
Jose Angel Juarez/AFP/Getty Images
Trump has long been accused of fueling anti-immigrant sentiment in the US by making regular racist comments in the public domain.
Most recently he was condemned as racist for telling four US non-white Congresswomen to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came" on July 14.
Trump has long avoided condemning white nationalism directly. Trump notably refused to denounce violent white nationalists at a march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, where a white nationalist killed a counter-protester by ramming her with his car. He instead condemned "hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides."
Responding to the shooting in El Paso, Democratic Party 2020 hopeful Pete Buttigieg said that white supremacists "feel validated" by Trump’s vitriol toward migrants.
While raising the mental health of the gunmen, which he did while taking questions from reporters in Morristown, New Jersey, President Trump also said that "hate has no place in our country" and that "we’re going to take care" of mass shootings.
He did not give specifics.
There have been 255 mass shootings in the US so far in 2019, according to data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.
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See Also:
- ‘Trump has to stop’: The president’s racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric has encouraged mass shootings, including El Paso, according to hate and extremism expert
- More than 900 migrant children have been split from their parents since Trump formally ended family separations last year
- The 2 Canadian teen fugitives were searched at an alcohol checkpoint the day they were charged with murder, but authorities let them go
Source: Business Insider – feedback@businessinsider.com (Bill Bostock)