WHICH IS WHY THE TRUMPBOTS LOVE HIM:

By Monday morning, Trump still had not heeded the plea of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern -- whom he spoke with on the phone Friday -- to offer his nation's "sympathy and love for all Muslim communities." But the president had contorted himself into a victim of the tragedy, griping on Twitter: "The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible attack in New Zealand."

Trump's tepid response to the New Zealand massacre has highlighted the president's fraught and combative relationship with Islam and Muslims, which dates back at least to his campaign. Throughout his presidential bid and his presidency, Trump has made statements and enacted policies that many Muslim Americans and others find offensive and upsetting at best -- and dangerous and Islamophobic at worst. 

In a lengthy manifesto, the admitted shooter, a white man from Australia, described Trump as "a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose" and seemed to echo some of the U.S. president's hard-line rhetoric on immigration, describing immigrants as "invaders within our lands." [...]

"What I've seen in the right wing -- people who haven't been as engaged in the political system until Trump came along, they really are taking his language very seriously," said Mohamed Elibiary, a Texas Republican and Muslim who has served as a homeland security expert for the U.S. government. "He is promoting this nostalgic vision of America. He is always getting us to look backwards." [...]

[T]he president has a long history of disparaging Muslims and other minorities, while simultaneously refusing to forcefully condemn white supremacy and violent nationalism. After a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 left a woman dead, for instance, Trump held a freewheeling news conference in which he said "both sides" were to blame. 

"In the Republican Party, we've already had folks who liked to play footsie with the bigotry, but when it came to serious moments, they would tighten up their language, they would be careful not to be seen or misconstrued as overtly bigoted," Elibiary said. "We haven't traditionally had presidents go to the well of white-identity grievances, at least not in my lifetime. I haven't seen a president try to hit those hot-button issues about us versus them." 

Trump fueled his political rise in part with birtherism -- the false and racist theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. The rest of his campaign, as well as his presidency, trafficked in language many Muslims found offensive.

At a September 2015 town hall in New Hampshire, for instance, Trump pledged to kick out of the United States all Syrian refugees, the majority of whom are Muslim, because they "could be ISIS," a reference to the Islamic State. The following month, in a television interview, Trump said he would "certainly look at" possibly closing mosques in the country. And the next month, Trump toyed with the idea of creating a database of all Muslims in the United States.

Also during the campaign, he repeated his false claim that during the 9/11 attacks, he watched Arabs in New Jersey cheer as the twin towers crashed down. When a man claiming allegiance to the Islamic State killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub in 2016, Trump called for vigilance and was quick to praise his own tough stance. [...]

One former senior administration official said Trump often associated Muslims with terrorism and rehashed grim Muslim terrorist attacks, even in private. "He thinks, and says sometimes, that Muslims are taking over Europe," this person said. 

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