The one word he did not mention is terror. And that’s no great surprise, because unless any evidence surfaces in the hours and days to come that the shooter, Stephen Paddock, had converted to Islam – none has emerged, other than the Islamic State making that claim on its Amaq News website – there’s no reason for Trump to designate it as a terror attack. In Trump’s book, if you commit an act of mass violence and you’re Muslim, you’re automatically a terrorist. In fact, that makes you a purveyor of “radical Islamic terror,” pronounced staccato as a shibboleth that, should you refuse to state it in its entirety, proves you are a radical leftist who supports terrorism. If you commit a mass shooting and you’re white and Christian, you’re simply a man who committed an act of evil.
It might be that you’re mentally ill. But even if evidence of Paddock’s psychological health ultimately points in that direction, it will still smack of double-standards: An American Christian’s act of violence can be blamed on his mental health, but if a Muslim shows signs of mental illness – such as in the case of Omar Mateen in the Orlando shooting last year – that hardly matters alongside the label of “radical Islamic terror.”
The textbook definition of terrorism involves the use of violence especially (but not exclusively) against civilians, especially in pursuit of political aims. This last bit is amorphous. We usually label as terrorism those horrific acts that have some political motive – and whether Paddock had one is yet unknown. That said, there have been many acts of terrorism that were designated as such despite the fact that it would be a stretch to call the perpetrators’ ideology political. When members of Aum Shinrikyo attacked the Tokyo subways with sarin gas in 1995, killing 12 and injuring 50, it was designated as an act of domestic terrorism despite the fact that the bizarre cult’s hope to bring about an apocalypse could hardly be classified as a political statement.
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