New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke to President Trump on Friday after a white nationalist killed 49 people while they were praying in Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The prime minister called the attack the country's “darkest day.” Ardern said Trump called her and asked what the United States could do. “I said to Donald Trump that New Zealand needed sympathy and love for all Muslim communities,” Ardern told reporters after the conversation. Ardern added that Trump “acknowledged that and agreed.” That same day, at a White House event during which the president vetoed a resolution to nix his declared national emergency to build his border wall, Trump was asked by a reporter if white-supremacist terror is a growing lethal threat, to which the president replied: “not really.” During the same event, Trump once again railed against the “border crisis,” stating that “killers” were “coming in.”
What has happened in Christchurch is an extraordinary act of unprecedented violence. It has no place in New Zealand. Many of those affected will be members of our migrant communities – New Zealand is their home – they are us.
