President Donald Trump acknowledged the one-year anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida, tweeting a tribute to the victims on Monday.
But a year ago, Trump politicized the shooting, using the attack on an LGBTQ nightclub to promote his campaign proposal to ban Muslims from the United States.
Trump tweeted self-congratulatory remarks less than 12 hours after the June 12, 2016 shooting.
“Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism,” he wrote.
The shooter, Omar Mateen, had pledged allegiance to the self-described Islamic State group, and the FBI had previously investigated him for ties to terrorism.
However, Mateen’s father said his son was not motivated by religion and had attacked the nightclub after being offended by two gay men kissing.
Trump publicly called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” after a Muslim couple carried out a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in 2015. The pair had reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS on social media, but then-FBI Director James Comey said the FBI had not found evidence that they had direct links to the group.
Trump has a pattern of reacting immediately to attacks committed by Muslims, even before full details emerge, while he barely mentions or is slow to acknowledge white supremacist terror.
Mirroring his response to the Orlando massacre, Trump used the terrorist attack in London earlier this month to promote his executive order banning travel and immigration from six majority-Muslim countries ― a modified version of the ban he proposed during his campaign.
U.S. courts have temporarily halted Trump’s executive order from going into effect. On Monday, the order faced another legal loss when a federal appeals court refused to reinstate it.
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