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Acting chief of staff: Trump is not a white supremacist
02:08 - Source: CNN
CNN  — 

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney defended President Donald Trump after critics denounced Trump’s rhetoric after Friday’s mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand.

“The President is not a white supremacist,” Mulvaney said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I’m not sure how many times we have to say that.”

“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,” he said.

Mulvaney was asked if the President would deliver a major speech condemning anti-Muslim bigotry and white supremacy.

“Well, I think you saw that yesterday in the tweet. The President—I’m not sure what more you want the President to do. You may say you want him to give a national speech to address the nation. That’s fine, maybe we do that, maybe we don’t,” Mulvaney told Fox News.

He added that the President is “doing everything we can to prevent this type of thing from happening here.”

On Friday, Trump sent his condolences to the people of New Zealand on Twitter. He later told reporters in the Oval Office that he does not regard white nationalism as a rising global threat.

Democratic 2020 candidate and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Trump’s rhetoric exacerbated tensions and called for him to condemn bigotry against Muslims.