The mayor of New York City and governor of New York state on Wednesday criticized President Donald Trump for his political maneuvering in the wake of a deadly terrorist attack in New York City.
“The last thing the President or anyone else should do is politicize this tragedy,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told CNN’s Chris Cuomo Wednesday morning, asked about Trump’s blaming Democrats for the attack in tweets Wednesday morning, and his advocacy for stricter controls on immigration.
“We have to find out what happened here,” de Blasio continued. “That work is going to be done by the FBI, by the NYPD and all of our partners to determine exactly who this man is, what moved him to this horrible act, what’s going on here? Is there any bigger ramifications? That’s what we should be focused on. But look, in the end, the last thing we should do is start casting aspersions on whole races of people, or whole religions or whole nations. That only makes the situation worse.”
The mayor added: “The minute you start generalizing it, especially to a whole religion, then, unfortunately, we are sending the exact negative message that a lot of our enemies want, and the terrorists want to affirm — that this nation is somehow anti-Muslim. We’ve got to do the exact opposite. We’ve got to show we respect all people in America.”
In a separate interview with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, MSNBC “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski asked “Are the President’s tweets helpful, hurtful or not impactful, given the situation?”
“I think the first question, Mika, is, are they factual?” Cuomo replied. “But I don’t think this is the time to get political.”
“We had a policy, an immigration policy in place in the ’90s. It was a bipartisan policy, it signed by a Republican president. There’s no doubt that we have to be smarter and have more intelligence, but there’s also no doubt that this is not the time to play politics.”
He continued: “This is not the time to foment hate. This is not the time to divide. Because they all exacerbate the situation, right?”
Different public officials, Cuomo said, “will handle it differently.”
