Mulvaney: Trump ‘is not a white supremacist’

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Sunday rejected any connection between an alleged gunman who killed dozens of people in New Zealand and President Trump, saying that “the president is not a white supremacist.”

“The president is not a white supremacist. I’m not sure how many times we have to say that,” Mulvaney said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“And to simply ask the question every time something like this happens overseas or even domestically, to say ‘Oh my goodness. It must somehow be the president’s fault,’ speaks to a politicization of everything that I think is undermining sort of the institutions that we have in the country today,” he continued.

“Let’s take what happened in New Zealand yesterday for what it is — a terrible, evil, tragic act — and figure out why those things are becoming more prevalent in the world,” he said. “Is it Donald Trump? Absolutely not.”

Mulvaney said it’s unfair to cast the individual responsible for killing 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand as a Trump supporter based on a reference to the president in the shooter’s so-called manifesto. 

“This was a disturbed individual, an evil person. … To try to tie him to an American politician of either party probably ignores some of the deeper difficulties that this sort of activity exposes,” he said.

“Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace noted that the president has used rhetoric that has inflamed tensions, playing a 2016 clip in which then-candidate Trump said he believes “Islam hates us” as well as comments from last week in which Trump described the influx of illegal immigration as an “invasion.”