Donald Trump telephoned a grieving Jacinda Ardern in the aftermath of New Zealand’s largest ever mass murder. According to reports, the President asked what the United States could do and received an answer he couldn’t have been expecting. “Sympathy and love for all Muslim communities,” the Prime Minister told him.

Jacinda Ardern has been widely praised as doing a magnificent job in a situation no national leader should have to face. In response to unimaginable horror, after an Australian gunman killed 50 people at two Christchurch mosques on Friday, she is deliberately employing language of empathy not hate. Ardern has chosen a message of togetherness instead of reaching for the easy, crude politics of division that have worked so effectively, and for so many, in the past.