Pro-Trump pastor slams GOP for Rittenhouse sympathy amid Buffalo shooting

Republican reactions to Saturday’s mass shooting in Buffalo have drawn sharp criticism from an unlikely source: a religious leader who is particularly pro-Trump.

dr Darrell Scott, an Ohio pastor and one of the first evangelical Christian leaders to support former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, released a statement on Twitter Monday criticizing the lack of compassion GOP lawmakers showed to the victims of the Buffalo shooting. Scott also elicited the positive responses received from Kyle Rittenhouse and Nicholas Sandman at right.

“The lack of expressions of sympathy for ten dead American victims of a mass shooting by the ‘leaders’ of the right is dire,” Scott wrote on Twitter. “They expressed more sympathy for Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed three people, and Nicolas Sandman, who was stared at, than they did for the 10 innocents killed in Buffalo.”

Scott co-founded the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland and later served as an advisor on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. After Trump’s election, he was selected to be a member of his Executive Transition Team. Scott made multiple appearances at Trump rallies before and after the election and later co-founded the National Diversity Coalition for Trump with Michael Cohen.

18-year-old Payton S. Gendron allegedly killed 10 people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo after walking more than 200 miles from his home in Conklin, New York. Gendron, who posted a white supremacist manifesto online prior to the shooting that contained references to the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, is believed by authorities to have chosen the Buffalo supermarket because it was in an area with a high percentage of black residents. Ultimately, 11 of his 13 alleged victims were black.

Local law enforcement officials have said Gendron planned an even bigger killing spree than he could pull off.

“It appeared that his plans were to drive away from here and keep going down Jefferson Avenue to shoot more black people than he could and possibly go to another store,” Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said Good morning America On Monday.

Some lawmakers on the far-right fringe of the Republican Party have claimed the shooting was a false flag operation. Wendy Rogers, a Trump-backed Arizona state senator, said of the shooting that “the fed-boy summer has begun in Buffalo,” echoing far-right conspiracy theories that claim FBI agents commit acts of violence to make conservatives look bad to permit.

news week reached out to Republican Party officials for comment.