President Trump took to Twitter Monday to condemn a deadly knife attack in Portland Friday that left two people dead, calling the attack “unacceptable.”
“The violent attacks in Portland on Friday are unacceptable,” Trump tweeted from the official @POTUS account. “The victims were standing up to hate and intolerance. Our prayers are w/ them.”
Two men, Ricky John Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche, were stabbed to death Friday attempting to protect two women from suspect Jeremy Christian — whom police say was targeting the women with “hate speech or biased language.” One of the women was wearing a hijab, and Christian is believed to have attacked Muslims in particular.
“He was saying that Muslims should die,” one of the women’s mothers told The Oregonian.
Another man, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, was injured but survived. Police say they will be looking at Christian’s past racist statements and actions, amid reports he is a white supremacist.
Some left-wing critics of Trump had pounced on the incident to first blame him for creating a climate for the incident to happen, and then for not immediately tweeting about it.
“This “extremism” may be of a different type than gets most of your attention, or even the attention in the press,” complained news anchor Dan Rather in an open letter on Facebook. “But that doesn’t make it any less serious, or deadly. And this kind of “extremism” is on the rise, especially in the wake of your political ascendancy.”
However, Rather’s narrative was called into question when it emerged that Christian had apparently supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016.
Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY
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