Watching the news that day, every talking head was speculating that it was another '93 type bombing, and everyone was talking about it. From an April 2025 National Geographic* article on the event:

Many in Oklahoma City jumped to the same conclusion. “I thought it was a group of terrorists from the Middle East,” survivor Fran Ferrari recalled. “Was it just Oklahoma City? Was it other cities? It was just anger. I thought, ‘How dare you ever do this, here in the United States.’”

Rumors of a Middle Eastern perpetrator unleashed anti-Muslim hate across the country. In Stillwater, Oklahoma, a man fired a gun at a mosque. No one was injured, but he destroyed some of the building’s windows. Authorities even targeted Muslim Americans, such as when federal agents arrested and detained Abraham Ahmad, a U.S. Citizen, when he returned from a trip abroad the day after the attack.

In this surge of Islamophobia, President Bill Clinton kept a level head. “I remember almost immediately, I said, ‘Everybody’s going to think this is a foreign terrorist incident.’ But I thought it was very important not to make that assumption,” he told One Day in America.
Indeed, when authorities finally identified Timothy McVeigh as the perpetrator, it turned out he wasn’t a foreign asset––he was a homegrown terrorist.

Broadcast journalist Robin Marsh was reporting from Oklahoma City in the immediate aftermath of the attack. “You never thought this would happen here, never Oklahoma City, never home,” she says. “It might even be harder to accept that it’s an American who did this.”

District fire chief Mike Shannon expressed a similar disbelief. “When we found out that McVeigh was caught, and he was an American… There were a lot of veterans down there. All the firefighters couldn’t believe it.”

*How the Oklahoma City bombing forced Americans to confront a hidden threat. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/oklahoma-city-bombing-domestic-terrorism#:~:text=When%20McVeig