Trump’s remarks drew quick condemnation from British authorities. Prime Minister Theresa May, one of the allied leaders with whom Trump has forged a good relationship, scolded the president, asking him not to speculate on the culprits of the attack. A police spokesperson also told CNN Trump’s statement was “pure speculation given we don’t know who is involved” and “unhelpful.”

Shooting from the hip is not unusual for Trump. After an attack in Barcelona last month, Trump quickly condemned it as terror and resurrected an old and slanderous falsehood about General John Pershing’s handling of Muslim fighters in the Philippines. Earlier this year, he got into a tiff with London Mayor Sadiq Khan over the response to terror, also drawing chastisement from British authorities. And during the presidential campaign, he was quick to label the downing of an EgyptAir flight as terror, even though few facts were then known.

Moving quickly to label these attacks as terror may be somewhat irresponsible—as I have written, Trump is eager to stoke fear in a way that few other politicians will, even when it creates problems for foreign allies—but there is a political logic to it: Trump has been right in nearly every case where he has jumped the gun so far, and it makes him look tough on terror.

Yet that doesn’t explain why he was so deliberate in his response to Charlottesville, where clashes broke out during a neo-Nazi and alt-right rally in defense of a statue of Robert E. Lee, and a man with white-supremacist links allegedly murdered a young woman by driving his car into a crowd. In that case, Trump was slow to speak, and when he did, he condemned bad actors “on all sides.” That stunned many observers, who couldn’t understand why Trump wouldn’t draw a line between white supremacists and those opposing them. The following week saw a tortured series of Trump statements. He tried to clean up his initial remarks with a sober “racism is evil” statement, then delivered a blistering press conference saying there “were very fine people on both sides.”

It is possible, of course, to deplore violence as a means in any form, while also recognizing that the underlying motivations for white supremacists and neo-Nazis are different in type from those arrayed against them. But this is not a distinction that Trump drew. After the Charlottesville saga, Trump complained that the media “didn’t cover [him] fairly” and said, “It is a very important statement. So I don’t want to go quickly and just make a statement for the sake of making a political statement. I want to know the facts.” Yet in the case of London, he was eager to make his point, not to get facts. The question remains why he is able to deliver clarion calls so swiftly against what he believes are Islamist terror attacks, but hesitates when it comes to more obvious violence by white supremacists.