Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday that the New Zealand mosque massacre, where a white supremacist allegedly killed 50 people, had nothing to do with President Donald Trump's rhetoric and that the president "is not a white supremacist," NBC News reports.
"You've seen the president stand up for religious liberty, individual liberty," Mulvaney said on "Fox News Sunday." "The president is not a white supremacist. I'm not sure how many times we have to say that. And to simply ask the question, every time something like this happens overseas, or even domestically, to say, 'Oh, my goodness, it must somehow be the president's fault,' speaks to a politicization of everything that I think is undermining sort of the institutions that we have in the country today."
On CBS's "Face the Nation," Mulvaney said Trump "is no more to blame for what happened in New Zealand than Mark Zuckerberg is because he created Facebook." The social networking site said it removed 1.5 million videos of the shooting within 24 hours of the attack.
Trump condemned the shooting on Friday, but when asked if he believes white nationalist terrorism and violence is a rising concern globally, the president said, "I don't really." Trump added that he thinks "it's a small group of people that have very, very serious problems."
