Both presidential candidates commented on the NY bombings - so why the criticism of Donald Trump?

Casting Trump as the villain feeds the notion that the mainstream media/the establishment/the liberal left are conspiring against him and those who would support him

Despite no official confirmation Trump pronounced that bombers were to blame (Getty Images)

It is perhaps a sign of the times that when an unexpected explosion takes place we automatically wonder if it was caused by a bomb. This weekend news broke of an explosion in a residential area of Barcelona, which killed one person and injured seventeen more. An act of terror perhaps? Spain, after all, has been targeted before by Islamist extremists, most notably in the 2004 train bombings in Madrid. And memories of Basque separatist outrages are hardly long-distant.

As it happens, the most likely cause of the blast in Barcelona appears to have been a gas leak. Early news reports noted that gas engineers had investigated the scene while noting that no final determination had been made. That didn’t stop speculation on social media.

Over the pond meanwhile, America was shaken by reports on Saturday of explosions in New Jersey and, later on, in New York. Again, with detail still thin on the ground the rumour-mill kicked in and suppositions about bombings came thick and fast – but not just on social media. Despite no official confirmation from the NYPD or other relevant authorities in New York, Donald Trump – never one to worry too much about the need for caution – saw a potential piece in his campaign jigsaw and pronounced that bombers were to blame. America, he said, needed to be “tough, smart and vigilant”.

Trump wasn’t alone. His rival for the Oval Office, Hillary Clinton, referred to “bombings” in an address shortly afterwards, although she was widely reported to have taken a more cautious approach, indicating that she would not comment further until the authorities’ investigations were more advanced. It remains unclear to what degree the presidential nominees had received detailed briefings from the police, and to what extent Trump’s decisiveness moulded Clinton’s own response.

Many media outlets reported the responses of the competing White House candidates, yet for the most part remained relatively restrained in their wider coverage until the existence of bombs was confirmed on Sunday by the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo. And whatever the final verdict, surely a degree of guardedness is what ought to mark out a serious news organisation from social media – or, in this case, a politician (or indeed two politicians) who are seeking to determine a particular narrative for their own ends.

However, it seems an odd thing for the media to be self-congratulatory about its own watchfulness and critical of others, particularly when media disapproval of Trump has outweighed so significantly that of Hillary Clinton for making fundamentally the same assertion (albeit in contrasting styles and with varying levels of caveating). It shows the degree to which the presidential campaign is itself dominating the news even when it is not directly the subject of a particular story – although it is hard to imagine the focus would have been quite the same had there been 29 fatalities in New York instead of 29 injuries.

There is another reason why any right-thinking person should beware a dig at the man they call the Donald. Trump is in many ways buffoonish; and he is undoubtedly a provocateur. But that doesn't mean he is always wrong. Indeed, on this occasion he was – at least in terms of the basic facts – absolutely right and almost certainly had good grounds, via official or unofficial briefings, to feel confident in describing the explosions as bombings. That isn’t to say his pronouncement should have been taken as Gospel, but casting Trump as the villain of the piece on this occasion simply feeds the notion that the mainstream media/the establishment/the liberal left are conspiring against him and those who would support him.

Trump, of course, thrives on being cast as the outsider. Moreover, his campaign is founded on emotion above reason, rhetoric above fact. When set in a nationalistic context – as they are in Trump’s run for the Presidency – those can be powerful political tools. But the best way to counter them is not by equal and opposite appeals to sensation or sentiment – in this case by jumping on the bandwagon of Trump criticism – but by maintaining a cool head.