According to a report from the New York Times, Muslim residents of Maujpur, where the violence took place, had been protesting the citizenship law for several weeks. Then on Sunday, Kapil Mishra, a local leader from Modi’s party, showed up and “threatened to mobilize a mob to clear out the protesters,” saying he didn’t want any trouble while Trump was visiting and warning that as soon as Trump left, he would take matters into his own hands. Shoaib Ahmad, a Muslim businessman whose shop was burned down, said that police officers encouraged mobs to destroy property owned by Muslims.
Of course, it’s not surprising that Trump, who has banned people from six Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the United States, would simultaneously view Modi as being full of tolerance despite the whole discrimination-against-Islam thing. Put him in a time machine and he’d probably have similarly complimentary things to say about Hitler the day after Kristallnacht.
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Trump’s always-wrong economic adviser declares coronavirus “contained”
Larry Kudlow has been relatively quiet for the last few months, but on Tuesday he was trotted out to toe the administration line that the coronavirus is much ado about nothing, in an obvious—and not very successful!—attempt to calm the markets. “We have contained this, I won’t say airtight but pretty close to airtight,” Kudlow told CNBC. That proclamation, of course, would be a lot more believable if (1) the CDC hadn‘t just said the exact opposite, (2) Kudlow had ever been right about anything, and (3) we didn’t know that Trump has specifically “told advisers that he does not want the administration to do or say anything that would further spook the markets,” remaining “worried that any large-scale outbreak could hurt his reelection bid.”
Remember the college-admissions scandal?