Trump and Clinton respond to NYC explosion with promises and critique

(Image credit: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)

last updated 18 September 2016

Presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump each responded late Saturday night to the explosion that rocked New York City's Chelsea neighborhood earlier that evening.

"Just before I got off the plane, a bomb went off in New York and nobody knows exactly what's going on, but, boy we are really in a time," Trump said at a campaign rally in Colorado. "We better get very tough, folks. It's a terrible thing that's going on in our world and in our country and we are going to get tough and smart and vigilant. We'll see what it is."

When Clinton responded, she took the opportunity to snipe at Trump for jumping to conclude, absent then-available evidence, that the blast was caused by a bomb. "I think it's important to know the facts about any incident like this," she said shortly before midnight. "That's why it's critical to support the first responders, the investigators who are looking into it trying to determine what did happen. I think it's also wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions because we are just in the beginning stages of trying to determine what happened."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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