Ayanna Pressley: I Don’t Call Trump the ‘President’ — ‘He Is Simply Occupying the Oval Office’

Tuesday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) slammed President Donald Trump, saying she refused to vocally recognize him as “President” Trump.

“He’s consistent if nothing else, Anderson, this is who he was before,” Pressley said. “He was elected to the Oval Office, you know, leading the birther movement, denying rental units to African-Americans, calling for the death penalty, ostensibly a lynching of the Central Park and now the exonerated five. And so he’s consistent. Here’s someone who was more upset about people throwing paint on Confederate statues, then the embedded and systemic institutionalized racism. I don’t call him the president. He’s the occupant. He is simply occupying the Oval Office. He is void of the empathy, the compassion, the intellect, the strategy and the sense of responsibility.”

“And so yes, he does so division,” she continued. “And I’m encouraged that there is a movement that is emboldened in the face of that, and demanding that Congress lead and act as the conscience of this nation, in the absence of presidential leadership. Someone who, you know, I’m a woman of faith, and we often sing a spiritual I feel like a motherless child, which is about the walls of the world. And I feel like an American without a president.”

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