Opinion: Another terror attack, another thoughtless Trump tweetstorm

After Saturday night’s terrorist attack in London, President Trump tweeted: “Whatever the United States can do to help in London and the U. K., we will be there - WE ARE WITH YOU. GOD BLESS!”

Unfortunately, that admirable expression of solidarity wasn’t his first or last Twitter comment on the attack.

His first Twitter response was to recycle a Drudge Report tweet reading: “Fears of new terror attack after van ‘mows down 20 people’ on London Bridge.”

A little more than an hour later, he tweeted again, using the attack as leverage to try to persuade the Supreme Court to reverse a federal appeals court’s ruling that his revised executive order on immigration was unconstitutional:

“We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” (Never mind that the travel ban wouldn’t apply to the UK or that it wasn’t clear at that point that the perpetrators weren’t British subjects.)

Then came the tweet expressing solidarity and condolences.

But Trump wasn’t finished. On Sunday morning he tweeted: “We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people. If we don’t get smart it will only get worse.”

A few minutes later, he shamed the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan: “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’ ”

This was a tasteless twisting of what Khan said. Here’s the full quotation: “Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days. There’s no reason to be alarmed.”

In other words, the mere presence of the police in a neighborhood wouldn’t mean that there was a threat in that area; not that hard to understand.

Finally, Trump tweeted: “Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That’s because they used knives and a truck!”

Critics rushed to point out that had guns been as plentiful in the UK as they are in the U.S. there probably would have been more deaths in London on Saturday night.

It’s true that the State Department issued a more traditionally diplomatic and restrained statement of solidarity with the British on its Twitter account. But the president is the leader of the country and, for better or worse, his tweets have achieved the status of official pronouncements.

Late last month, as the investigation of possible ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign dominated the headlines, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was considering asking lawyers to screen his tweets. Maybe someone from the State Department should also be involved. Trump’s tweets about Russia aren’t the only ones that need to be subjected to extreme vetting.

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