Democrats are blaming President Donald Trump for the shootings in El Paso on Saturday and another in Dayton, Ohio overnight that killed 29 people.
Politico reported:
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown attacked his Republican colleagues for failing to defy the gun lobby and pass any kind of gun control legislation.
He also called for President Donald Trump to tone down his “divisive racist rhetoric” but stopped short of conceding that Trump’s language has encouraged white supremacist terrorism.
Democrat and presidential candidate Julian Castro “pointed to a ‘toxic brew’ of white nationalism and says Trump needs to do more to “unite Americans instead of fanning the flames of bigotry.”
NBC reported Democrat presidential candidate and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) “argued Sunday the President Trump’s rhetoric on immigration has helped to stoke racial resentment and a climate of hate in light of Saturday’s mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.”
“We have a president of the United States who is particularly responsible,” Booker said in an interview with Meet the Press.
“In my faith, you have this idea that you reap what you sow, and he is sowing seeds of hatred in this country, this harvest of hate violence that we are seeing right now lies at his feet,” Booker said. “There is a complicity in the president’s hatred that undermines the goodness and decency of Americans.”
CNN reported:
Democratic presidential candidate and El Paso, Texas, native Beto O’Rourke said that President Donald Trump was a white nationalist after a mass shooting in El Paso on Saturday left 20 dead and a separate rampage hours later killed nine more in Dayton, Ohio.
CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday asked O’Rourke, a former El Paso congressman: “Do you think President Trump is a white nationalist?”
“Yes. I do,” O’Rourke said on CNN’s State of the Union. The Democrat also referenced Trump’s record of insulting Mexicans as “rapists” and describing asylum-seeking migrants as an infestation. “The things that he has said both as a candidate and then as the President of the United States, this cannot be open for debate,” he said.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Democrat candidate and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, said the United States is “under attack from homegrown white nationalist terrorists.”
“White nationalism is evil, and it is inspiring people to commit murder, and it is being condoned at the highest levels of the American government, and that has to end,” Buttigieg said at a candidate forum in Las Vegas.
“He later specified that he was referring to Trump,” the Times reported.
“The president of the United States is condoning white nationalism,” Buttigieg said.
Presidential hopeful and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) posted an interview she gave on Twitter where she directed her remarks to the president.
“Have the courage to act,” Harris tweeted. “Do something. Do something. Because when I’m elected president, I’m going to do something.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) blamed the Republican-controlled Senate for the shootings.
“Too many families in too many communities have been forced to endure the daily horror of gun violence,” Pelosi said. “Enough is enough. The Republican Senate’s continued inaction dishonors our solemn duty to protect innocent men, women, and children and end this epidemic once and for all.”
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