New York attack: Trump uses terror to push extreme vetting

Donald Trump took to Twitter to condemn a truck attack in Manhattan yesterday that left at least eight people dead - but some commentators questioned whether the president’s outrage conveniently fed into his narrative about Islamic extremism and the need to impose extreme vetting of immigrants.

“In NYC, looks like another attack by a very sick and deranged person,” Trump tweeted shortly after the vehicle mounted a busy cycle lane near the National September 11 Memorial.

He published a follow-up stating that the US “must not allow ISIS to return” and that he was planning to “step up our already Extreme Vetting Program”.

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Trump’s reaction “is in keeping with his responses to other attacks” in which the perpetrator was alleged to have possible links with Islamic State, says Al Jazeera English. However, the website notes, the president’s responses seem more subdued when it comes to attacks involving non-Muslims.

Following an Isis-related attack on London Bridge that left eight dead in June, Trump published a highly charged tweet mocking London Mayor Sadiq Khan for saying that there was “no reason to be alarmed”.

Following a fatal shooting on the Champs-Elysees in Paris in April - also claimed by Isis - Trump tweeted that “the people of France will not take much more of this”.

However, following an attack in Las Vegas in October, in which 58 people were shot dead by Stephen Paddock, an American not associated with Islam, Trump took more than five hours to respond, and did so in a more subdued tone.

In August, following violence in Charlottesville that saw a white supremacist drive his car into a crowd of anti-racism protesters, killing a 32-year-old woman, Trump tweeted condolences.

“Any condemnation of the attacker or his ideology was absent, and there was no call by the US president to address the issue of rising white supremacism in the US,” says Al Jazeera English.