(CNN)-Londoners did their best to keep calm and carry on after the latest night of carnage in a Western European city on Saturday.
But across the Atlantic, President Donald Trump used Twitter to stoke fear for political gain, lambasted London’s Muslim mayor, then motorcaded to his nearby namesake luxury golf links.
On the one hand, Trump’s response to the London attack, in which 7 people died only two weeks after a horrendous suicide bombing in Manchester, was par for the course.
After all, as a candidate Trump said himself that foreign terror attacks were good for his political fortunes — and he’s reacted to other foreign terrorist incidents by seeming to teeter on the edge of gloating that he had predicted them.
Still, his response to the London attacks was a jarring reminder of how his whiplash instincts shatter the mold of conventional presidential behavior.
It may also start a conversation about whether Trump is testing the limits of appropriate behavior for a head of state, let alone the leader of the West and whether his swift turn to politics as the dead were still being counted was in poor taste.
One thing is for sure, his Twitter spree after the London attack will have offended many people in Britain, where the President is already deeply unpopular. His brash attitude had already set European teeth on edge after his foreign trip last month.