Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen supported presumptive Democratic nominee for president Hillary Rodham Clinton because he opposed the presidential candidacy of presumptive GOP nominee Donald J. Trump.
Mateen’s friend Mohammed Malik revealed Mateen’s support for Hillary Clinton in a Washington Post essay this week. Malik wrote:
We talked about the presidential election and debated our views of the candidates that were running – he liked Hillary Clinton and I liked Bernie Sanders. This banter continued through texts and phone calls for several months. My last conversation with Omar was by phone in mid-May. He called me while he was at the beach with his son to tell me about a vacation he’d taken with his father to Orlando the previous weekend. He’d been impressed by the local mosque.
Malik revealed, in a follow-up interview with NBC News, the reason why Mateen—his friend who would go on to slaughter 49 people in an Orlando nightclub in the name of the Islamic State after pledging allegiance to its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—supported Hillary Clinton for president.
“Mateen told him he liked Hillary Clinton because he wanted a candidate who could beat Donald Trump in November,” NBC News reported from their interview with Malik.