President Donald Trump responded to a terror attack in a London Underground station on Friday by saying that the U.S. should expand his ban of travelers from predominately Muslim countries.
He later told reporters that, “we have to be tougher [on terrorism]. Perhaps we’re not nearly tough enough.”
Trump signed a revised executive order earlier this year blocking travelers from six majority-Muslim countries, including Syrian refugees, from the United States.
Multiple federal appeals courts had blocked the ban, but in June, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from the administration of those rulings, giving the executive order a temporary green light.
Trump has previously used a terrorist attack in Britain to promote the ban. In June, he responded to an assault on London Bridge by tweeting, “we need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” He also attacked London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s response to the attack, prompting Khan to call on U.K. officials to cancel the president’s upcoming visit.
Khan, the U.K. capital’s first Muslim mayor, responded to Trump’s tweets on Friday by saying, “I’m not going to go there.”
A police spokesperson told CNN that Trump’s comments on Scotland Yard were “pure speculation” and “unhelpful.”
British Prime Minister Theresa May also criticized Trump’s tweets, saying that, “I never think it’s helpful for anybody to speculate on what is an ongoing investigation.”
Trump’s quick response to the attack belies claims he made in August following the violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he waited two days to condemn the far-right groups behind the event.
“I couldn’t have made it sooner, because I didn’t know all of the facts,” he said at the time. “It was very important to me to get the facts out and correctly. Because if I would have made a fast statement and the first statement was made without knowing much other than what we were seeing.”
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