Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke said Sunday that the blame for a mass shooting in his hometown of El Paso the day before falls on President Donald Trump and his rhetoric about minorities, accusing the president of “encouraging” such acts of violence.
In addition to shoring up gun control laws, the Democratic presidential candidate said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “We have to acknowledge the hatred, the open racism that we're seeing," adding that "there is an environment of it in the United States.
”The former congressman, who left the presidential campaign trail to return home in the wake of the shooting, repeatedly accused Trump of using language more commonly found during Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich but also said that the president’s rhetoric was also commonly found on the internet and even Fox News.
“He is encouraging this. He doesn't just tolerate it, he encourages it, calling immigrants rapists and criminals and seeking to ban all people of one religion,” O’Rourke told host Jake Tapper.
“Folks are responding to this. It doesn't just offend us, it encourages the violence we're seeing including in my hometown of El Paso yesterday.”
On Saturday afternoon, a gunman opened fire outside of a WalMart in a busy shopping center in El Paso, which sits just across the border from Mexico and has a large Latino population. Police say that the attack killed at least 20 and wounded two dozen others. The suspect, identified as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, is in custody. Authorities are working to see whether Crusius is the author of a racist, anti-immigrant manifesto posted online shortly before the attack and whether hate crime charges should be filed.
Hours later, a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, left nine dead and injured dozens.
Six days earlier, three were killed when a gunman opened fire at a garlic festival in Northern California.O’Rourke outlined a litany of instances by the president in which he has derided minorities or immigrants, including Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. during the 2016 presidential campaign, his assertion that there were “very fine people” on both sides of a 2017 neo-Nazi rally that turned violent and Trump’s more recent attacks on lawmakers of color.
“These are white men motivated by the kind of fear that this president traffics in,” O’Rourke argued of a spate of domestic terrorism instances targeting minorities.
Asked whether O’Rourke agreed with a fellow presidential hopeful, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, that Trump is a white nationalist, he answered in the affirmative.
“Yes. I do. And again from some of the record that I just recited to you, 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, telling Tapper that “you as well as I have a responsibility to call that out, to make sure that the American people understand what is being done in their name by the person who holds the highest position of public trust in this land.”
The president on Sunday tweeted his support for the people of El Paso and Dayton.
“God bless the people of El Paso Texas. God bless the people of Dayton, Ohio,” he tweeted.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine