This double standard would be unremarkable if it were a one-off. But it's becoming pretty apparent the US President – the leader of a vast and complex nation in which violence comes in many forms and cloaked in many ideologies of hate – is only exercised by acts that fit a particular narrative. This narrative underpinned his candidacy and increasingly his administration – of America and the West under threat from marauding outsiders – primarily Muslim extremists, or Mexican criminals, who can be thwarted with simplistic, blunt responses like travel bans and walls. But when it comes to other types of violent extremism, the loose-lipped President is proving remarkably mum. Consider the shooting attack on a Quebec mosque in late January, just after Trump was first sworn in, in which six people were murdered as they gathered to pray. The alleged perpetrator was a young Canadian with nationalist, far-right political views – reportedly an admirer of Trump himself. Trump – not known for restraint – had not a word to say or tweet publicly about this attack on his country's neighbour (though he reportedly privately telephoned Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau).

But days later when a man, reportedly screaming in Arabic, attacked soldiers outside the Louvre in Paris, causing injury to one person, the President didn't hold back: "A new radical Islamic terrorist has just attacked in Louvre Museum in Paris. Tourists were locked down. France on edge again. GET SMART U.S." he wrote on Twitter. It's true that the media and politicians – in the US as in Australia – have a long and inglorious history of inconsistency when it comes to the attention paid to different types of violence and terrorism. Attacks involving perpetrators suspected of holding radical Islamist views grab headlines in ways many other deadly crimes - like domestic abuse, which claims far more lives in both countries – shamefully do not. But the inability of the new President to even acknowledge the other forms of extremism is nonetheless striking given what is going on in the US today. The US has a long and troubling history of domestic terrorism rooted in anti-government, white supremacist and other extremist ideologies – from the Ku Klux Klan to the Oklahoma City bombing, to the 2015 massacre of nine black parishioners in a Charleston church by Dylann Roof, who frequented white supremacist websites. According to the FBI's latest annual report, for the year 2015, hate crimes are rising in the US, most markedly against Muslims. There have been several failed but serious terror plots in the last year – including a thwarted plan by an anti-government militia to blow up an apartment block and mosque populated by Somali Muslim refugees in Kansas on the day after the election, or a separate plan to kill Muslims in New York with a homemade device by a Klansman, who was recently sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Trump and his team's relentless framing of the threat to America as one posed by foreign, Muslim terrorists is simply out of step with the real threats faced in his country. According to the think tank New America, "jihadist" attacks account for 95 deaths from terrorism in the US since 2002 (49 in the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre alone), most of which were carried out by US citizens or legal residents. A further 51 people died as a result of what it classified as right-wing political violence and five from left-wing political violence. Nevertheless, the President maintains that a travel ban from a handful of Muslim-majority countries is what will keep Americans safe. Meanwhile, many fear his framing of the violent threat to Americans as only coming from Muslims and foreigners will only serve to increase the animus towards American Muslims which is fuelling the rise in hate crimes, and may in turn give succour to groups like Islamic State framing their bloody violence as a clash between Islam and the West. Trump and his ilk have long criticised his political opponents and the media over what he sees as a cowardice to confront terrorism by Islamist extremists or convey their full threat to the public – something that rings hollow given the media attention attacks like the one on Westminster command. But his own silence on the threat posed by anti-Muslim, white supremacist and other extremist ideologies of hate grows more conspicuous by the day.