President Obama spoke with Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, about the Dallas shootings during his trip to Europe for a NATO summit, his spokesman announced Saturday afternoon.
Obama made the phone call while flying from Poland to Madrid to offer his condolences on behalf of the American people for the five police officers who were killed in Dallas on Thursday night,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
The president also spoke with Dallas Police Department chief David Brown on Friday and addressed the ambush at length during a press conference on Saturday. “We cannot let the actions of a few define all of us,” Obama told reporters. “The demented individual who carried out those attacks in Dallas, he’s no more representative of African-Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans or the shooters in Orlando or San Bernardino were representative of Muslim Americans. They don’t speak for us; that’s not who we are.”
Obama is cutting short his Europe trip to travel to Dallas. “The decision to cut short a foreign trip is not one that the White House takes lightly,” USA Today noted. “Obama went ahead with plans to attend a baseball game in Havana with Cuban President Raul Castro after a terrorist attack in Brussels in March — famously doing “The Wave” with Castro — and then flew on to Argentina. But last year, he canceled a sightseeing trip to the Taj Mahal to instead pay his respects to the new king of Saudi Arabia, Salman, after the death of his half brother, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz.”
