On Monday morning, White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway went on Fox News to perform her regular ritual: the provision of alternative facts. This time, Conway's spin was directed towards last week's horrific shootings at two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques, which together killed 50 people in the nation's deadliest-ever deadliest terrorist attack.

The problem she addressed? In a 74-page manifesto, one of the alleged terrorists prominently name-checked Donald Trump, praising him as "a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose," if not a good "policy maker and leader." In an odd defense, Conway encouraged every single American to read the terrorist's manifesto in its entirety, noting that it contains but one reference to the president, which is sort of like saying that Jesus's appearance in but four of the Bible's 66 books makes him, at most, an interesting bit player in its narrative arc. (Conway also assures viewers that the shooter's writings indicate that "he's not a conservative, and he's not a Nazi"—an interesting choice of concepts to juxtapose without being asked.)

Conway was just one in a cavalcade of Trump allies who struggled to at once denounce the shooting while downplaying the shooter's open admiration for the President of the United States. On the Sunday talk-show circuit, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney pooh-poohed attempts to link the two as "absurd," while U.S. ambassador to New Zealand Scott Brown asserted that there wasn't "any credibility" to the obvious connection. “I don’t think anybody could say that the president is anti-Muslim,” Mulvaney added, referring to a person who campaigned on the explicit promise to ban Muslim immigration until the country "can figure out what the hell is going on."

Trump, meanwhile, followed up with a typically tone-deaf condolence tweet, extending his "warmest sympathies" to New Zealand and then dismissing white supremacy as an emerging global threat shortly thereafter. "I think it's a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess," he opined. This morning, he blamed the Fake News Media for its reporting on a piece of evidence that suggests the opposite.

The shooter's praise for the president is only the latest expression of enthusiasm for his administration from the white-supremacist sector. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump," former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke proclaimed at 2017's Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. "That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.” Both locally and globally, white nationalists like Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, Canada's Faith Goldy, and any number of MAGA red hat-wearing attendees at the Unite the Right rally have also found much to celebrate in Trump's gleeful anti-immigrant rhetoric.