What Their Reactions to Monday's Attacks Reveal About Trump and Obama
Two sets of statements tell radically different stories about who was being attacked, and why.
Monday’s horrors—the attack on a Christmas market in Berlin and the assassination of a Russian diplomat in Ankara—offer a natural experiment. Since they occurred during the brief window every four or eight years in which America has both a president and a president-elect, they provoked two sets of statements, one from the outgoing administration and another from its soon-to-be successor. The differences are revealing.
The first difference, unsurprisingly, is that the Berlin atrocity “appears to have been a terrorist attack.” Team Trump, by contrast, simply a “horrifying terror attack.” The White House about the Turkish assassin’s motive. Team Trump, by contrast, a “radical Islamic terrorist.”
