Trump Immediately Politicizes EgyptAir Crash, Blames Terrorism – Fox News Calls It ‘Good’ for Him

Why Wait for Facts? And Why Not Politicize a Tragedy? Trump and Fox News Think Fact-Less Politicization of Tragedy Is A-OK

News broke overnight that EgyptAir Flight 804 had lost contact and was missing. NLittle information about what happened became available until later Thursday morning, but at 6:27 AM EDT Donald Trump took to Twitter and rather than express concern for the 66 or so people and crew on board, rather than wait for facts, he ignored the families of those onboard, inflamed the situation, and politicized it by blaming the event on terrorism:

Here are some of the people affected that Trump couldn’t have cared less about:

The cause of the plane’s disappearance still has not been confirmed, although there are unconfirmed reports of debris being found. 

In “Donald Trump doesn’t wait for investigators to call missing EgyptAir flight act of terror,” CNN notes that it “isn’t the first time Trump has referred to something as terrorism before officials determine the cause.” 

Before the San Bernardino shootings were classified as an act of terror, Trump said that he thought it was terrorism, according to ABC News.

“Take a look. I mean, you look at the names, you look at what happened. You tell me,” Trump said. 

The real-estate mogul turned politician has come out with hardline proposals to combat terrorism, including arguing in favor of certain torture techniques.

 

Fox News Thursday morning discussed the tragedy in terms of a loss of tourism dollars for Egypt. As Salon’s Scott Eric Kaufman noted, Fox’s Stuart Varney weighed in, saying the crash was “good” for Trump, applauding him for having blamed the disaster on terrorism. (Video above, at the 1:50 mark.)

Some responses via Twitter:

 

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license