THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALTUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019 N ASAN DIEGO — From cable
news interviews early Monday
morning to speeches before a La-
tino civil rights group later in the
day, Democratic candidates for
president mounted one of their
most brutal offensives of the 2020
campaign against President
Trump, excoriating him over
rampant gun violence in America
and a racist and divisive culture
they accuse him of fostering.
It was a rare day when the can-
didates were largely in unison in
their message, as they raised
alarms about the mass shootings
in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio. Only
last week the candidates were
criticizing one another over policy
differences during their televised
debates; on Monday, the Demo-
crats were all but acting in concert
as they sought to hold Mr. Trump
accountable for his past remarks
on white supremacy and attacks
on people of color.
Former Representative Beto
O’Rourke of Texas and Represent-
ative Tim Ryan of Ohio, who hail
from the states where two gun-
men killed 31 people this weekend,
began Monday by strongly con-
demning Republican inaction on
passing gun control measures.
Their sentiments were echoed by
several of their 2020 rivals at a
gathering of the civil rights group,
UnidosUS, held here in San Diego.
“Mr. President, it’s long past
time you addressed it for what it
is: this is hatred, pure and simple,”
said former Vice President Joseph
R. Biden Jr. as he railed against
white supremacy and the most di-
visive actions of the Trump ad-
ministration. “And it’s being fu-
eled by rhetoric that is so divisive,
and it’s causing, causing people to
die.”
Senator Kamala Harris of Cali-
fornia, who gave one of the most
well-received speeches of the
gathering, appeared to tweak Mr.
Trump for saying that several
members of Congress who are
women of color should “go back”
to the countries they came from,
though most of them were born in
the United States.
“We are going to help him get
out of the White House and go
back to his reality television show
or wherever he came from,” she
said to loud and sustained ap-
plause. As she wrapped up her
speech, she ramped up her rheto-
ric, calling Mr. Trump “clearly a
racist.”
And Senator Bernie Sanders of
Vermont, who rarely focuses on
his biography in his political
speeches, wrote on Twitter about
his family’s losses in the Holo-
caust and the dangers facing
Americans today.
“Most of my father’s family was
brutally murdered at the hands of
Hitler’s white supremacist regime
— a regime which came to power
on a wave of violence and hatred
against racial and religious minor-
ities,” he wrote. “We cannot allow
that cancer to grow here.”
After weeks of open conflict be-
tween the Democratic presiden-
tial candidates, they largely dialed
back their direct and implicit criti-
cisms of each other. Most of the
candidates have ripped into Mr.
Trump on a daily basis in recent
months, but they used some of
their most pungent language on
Monday. They seized on the presi-
dent’s early-morning suggestion
to tie background checks on gun
purchasers to immigration legis-lation, his later comments that did
not include major new gun control
measures, and most of all his his-
tory of harsh remarks on race and
immigration.
Speaking with CNN from Day-
ton, where one of the shootings
killed nine people, Mr. Ryan also
demanded that Senator Mitch Mc-
Connell, the majority leader, “do
something.”
“People are getting killed in the
streets in America and nobody is
acting,” Mr. Ryan said.
Mr. O’Rourke, who is from El
Paso, where the other shooting
killed 22 people, continued to fo-
cus on a question he had been
asked late Sunday about whether
there was anything Mr. Trump
could do to make things better in
the wake of the shootings.
In an interview on MSNBC’s
“Morning Joe,” he said that the
president had exhibited “open
racism” — an “invitation to vio-
lence.”
“Anyone who is surprised” by
the violence, Mr. O’Rourke said,
“is part of this problem right now— including members of the me-
dia who ask, ‘Hey Beto, do you
think the president is racist?”
“Well, Jesus Christ, of course
he’s racist,” he said. “He’s been
racist from Day 1.”
These candidates were among
many Democratic primary con-
tenders who expressed continued
outrage about the shootings and
the strains of white nationalism
some said emanate from the
White House. The authorities in
Texas have said the El Paso shoot-
er wrote a manifesto posted online
that railed against immigrants
and that said the attack was “a re-
sponse to the Hispanic invasion of
Texas.”
“The attack two days ago was
an attack on the Latino communi-
ty,” said Julián Castro, the former
mayor of San Antonio and the only
Latino candidate in the race, who
received a warm welcome at
UnidosUS. “It was an attack on
immigrants. It was an attack on
Mexicans and Mexican-Ameri-
cans, and that is no accident. That
is due in part to the climate thatthis president has set, of division.
Of otherness.”
On Monday morning, Mr.
Trump said on Twitter that “We
cannot let those killed in El Paso,
Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, die in
vain” and called on Republicans
and Democrats to come together
to pass background checks, poten-
tially combined with immigration
reform legislation — a stipulation
that would make Democrats likely
to oppose it.
In additional comments later
Monday, Mr. Trump condemned
white supremacy but did not re-
peat his call for background
checks. Instead, he called for
stronger action to address mental
illness and argued that the inter-
net can “radicalize disturbed
minds.”
That contention, said Senator
Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Min-
nesota, was Mr. Trump’s attempt
“to avoid truth.”
“There’s mental illness & hate
throughout world, but U.S. stands
alone w/high rate of gun vio-
lence,” Ms. Klobuchar said onTwitter. “When someone can kill 9
people in a minute, that gun
should never have been sold.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts also took issue
with Mr. Trump’s framing of the
situation.
“White supremacy is not a men-
tal illness,” she said Monday after-
noon. “We need to call it what it is:
Domestic terrorism. And we need
to call out Donald Trump for am-
plifying these deadly ideologies.”
In San Diego, fury with Mr.
Trump was palpable as activists
convened at a sprawling conven-
tion center. Janet Murguía, the
group’s president and C.E.O.,
called on Mr. Trump to “rebuke,”
“condemn” and “apologize for this
climate that he has created,”
drawing a direct link between his
rhetoric and the shooting in El
Paso.
Officials with the organization
walked reporters through a poll of
1,854 eligible Latino voters, con-
ducted in June. Of them, 78 per-
cent said they were frustrated
with how Mr. Trump and his allies
treated immigrants and Latinos,
and that they were worried those
dynamics would get worse. Offi-
cials said they also saw that com-
bating gun control was rising in
importance for Latino voters.
Earlier Monday, Ms. Warren
and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of
New York were among the candi-
dates who called on Mr. McCon-
nell to bring lawmakers back into
session to vote on gun safety
measures, and in her speech at
UnidosUS, Ms. Klobuchar hit that
theme too, urging Washington to
act. In a CNN interview, Ms. Gilli-
brand called Mr. Trump’s sugges-
tion that gun measures be tied to
immigration reform “absurd.”
“He’s linking the issue of basic,
common-sense gun reform, that
we should be going back into the
Senate today to vote on, with this
issue of immigration because,
again, he continues to try to de-
monize people seeking asylum,”
she said.
By Monday afternoon, one
more high-profile Democrat had
weighed in.
“No other nation on Earth
comes close to experiencing the
frequency of mass shootings that
we see in the United States,” for-
mer President Barack Obama
said in a statement posted to Twit-
ter. He called on the public to push
for tougher gun laws and urged
law enforcement and internet
companies to work to reduce the
influence of groups that espouse
hate.‘Of Course He’s Racist’: Candidates Criticize Trump After Shootings
By KATIE GLUECK
and MATT STEVENSBeto O’Rourke, center, and Representative Veronica Escobar led a silent march on Sunday for victims of the El Paso mass shooting.IVAN PIERRE AGUIRRE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESKatie Glueck reported from San
Diego, and Matt Stevens from New
York.
Trump’s political opponents and
critics, who are demanding presi-
dential accountability.
No statement better captured
how the gun violence debate was
giving way to a reckoning on
extremism than a statement on
Monday afternoon from former
President Barack Obama. Mr.
Obama, who has weighed in
sparingly on public events since
leaving office, called both for gun
control and for an emphatic
national rejection of racism and
the people who stoke it.
“We should soundly reject
language coming out of the
mouths of any of our leaders that
feeds a climate of fear and hatred
or normalizes racist sentiments,”
Mr. Obama wrote, “leaders who
demonize those who don’t look
like us, or suggest that other
people, including immigrants,
threaten our way of life, or refer
to other people as subhuman, or
imply that America belongs to
just one certain type of people.”
Mr. Obama did not mention
Mr. Trump or any other leaders
by name.
The Democrats seeking the
presidency in 2020 did not hesi-
tate to do so: Mr. Trump had
scarcely finished speaking from
the White House on Monday
when his Democratic challengers
blamed him explicitly for giving
succor to extremists. Joseph R.
Biden Jr., the former vice presi-
dent and current Democratic
front-runner, accused Mr. Trump
on Twitter of having used the
presidency “to encourage and
embolden white supremacy.” And
in an interview with CNN, Mr.
Biden said Mr. Trump had “just
flat abandoned the theory that
we are one people.”
Other political leaders reacted
with their own raw distress and
alarm. Michael R. Bloomberg,
the former New York City mayor
who has bankrolled a yearslong
crusade for gun control, wrote in
a column that the “new atrocities
need to change the political
dynamic” around guns, and said
Mr. Trump’s remarks were little
more than “the usual dodge.”
And Democratic presidential
candidates rounded on Mr.
Trump in a front that tran-
scended ideological and tonal
divisions in the party. Senator
Elizabeth Warren of Massachu-
setts, a populist liberal, said Mr.
Trump must be held responsible
for “amplifying these deadly
ideologies,” while Senator Cory
Booker of New Jersey, who has
campaigned as an advocate for
racial justice and national heal-
ing, derided Mr. Trump’s speech
as a “bullshit soup of ineffective
words” in a text message that his
campaign manager posted on
Twitter.
An aide to Mr. Booker said he
would deliver a major speech on
gun violence on Wednesday
morning in South Carolina, at the
Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal Church in Charleston
where a white supremacist gun-
man killed nine people in 2015.
And the entwined issues of gun
violence and racist extremism
began to tumble into elections for
offices well beyond the presiden-
cy. In Colorado, Mike Johnston, a
former state lawmaker and gun-
control advocate who is challeng-
ing Senator Cory Gardner, a
Republican, blamed Mr. Trump
for having “created this toxic
culture that incites white nation-
alists.” In 2020, he said, candi-
dates would have to make a
stark binary choice.
“Either you’re on the side of
the white nationalist holding the
AR-15, or you’re on the side of
the millions of Americans living
in fear of them,” Mr. Johnston
said in an interview.
Mr. Trump, for his part, said he
was open to “bipartisan solu-
tions” that would address gun
violence, and blamed “the inter-
net and social media” for spread-
ing what he termed “sinister
ideologies.” He was not specific
about any next steps his admin-
istration would take, though he
stressed his strong support for
the death penalty and seemed to
express skepticism that gun
restrictions would be an appro-
priate remedy.
“Mental illness and hatred
pulls the trigger, not the gun,”
Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump’s campaign re-
sponded to criticism of the presi-
dent with a statement deploringDemocrats for “politicizing a
moment of national grief.”
“The president clearly con-
demned racism, bigotry and
white supremacy as he has re-
peatedly,” said Tim Murtaugh, a
spokesman for Mr. Trump’s
campaign. “He also called for
concrete steps to prevent such
violent attacks in the future.”
Mr. Murtaugh added that “no
one blamed Bernie Sanders”
when one of his supporters at-
tempted to kill a group of Repub-
lican lawmakers at a Virginia
baseball diamond in 2017. “The
responsibility for such horrific
attacks,” he said, “lies ultimately
with the people who carry them
out.”
If Mr. Trump and his allies are
adamant that he is blameless in
the rise of extremist violence,
much of the public believes he
has not adequately separated
himself from white supremacists.
A survey published in March by
the Pew Research Center found
that a majority of Americans —
56 percent — said Mr. Trump had
done “too little to distance him-
self from white nationalist
groups.” That group included
about a quarter of people who
identified themselves as Republi-
cans or as leaning toward Mr.
Trump’s party.
It has not only been liberals
who have argued that the mass
shooting in El Paso, and another
one hours later in Dayton, Ohio,
represented a crisis for the coun-try, and a major test for Mr.
Trump. The conservative maga-
zine National Review published
an editorial on Sunday evening
calling on Americans and their
government to take on “a mur-
derous and resurgent ideology —
white supremacy” in much the
same way the government has
confronted Islamic terrorism.
Mr. Trump, the magazine said,
“should take the time to con-
demn these actions repeatedly
and unambiguously, in both
general and specific terms.”
Frank Keating, the former
Republican governor of Okla-
homa, who led his state through
the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building in
Oklahoma City by domestic
terrorists, said in an interview
that the moment called for both
new restrictions on firearms and
a new tone from the White
House. He urged Mr. Trump to
“carefully choose your words” to
avoid instilling fear or inciting
anger.
“He needs to realize the le-
thality of his rhetoric,” Mr. Keat-
ing said.
“The truth is, the president is
the secular pope,” he added, “and
he needs to be a moral leader as
well as a government leader, and
to say that this must not occur
again — exclamation mark.”
It was not clear whether the El
Paso shooting had the potential
to become a pivot point in na-
tional politics, much as the Okla-homa City bombing had in the
1990s. After that attack, which
killed 168 people, President Bill
Clinton delivered a searing
speech against the “loud and
angry voices in America today
whose sole goal seems to be to
try to keep some people as para-
noid as possible” — a denuncia-
tion widely understood as being
aimed at the extreme right. Mr.
Clinton’s handling of the attack
helped restore voters’ confidence
in him as a strong leader after a
shaky start to his presidency.
Mr. Trump has shown no incli-
nation in the past to play a role of
such clarifying moral leadership,
or to engage in any kind of
searching introspection about his
own embrace of the politics of
anger and racial division. In the
aftermath of a white supremacist
march in Charlottesville, Va., in
2017 that resulted in the murder
of a young woman, Mr. Trump
said there had been “very fine
people on both sides” of the
unrest there. In recent weeks, he
has engaged without apology in
a sequence of attacks on promi-
nent members of racial minority
groups, including five different
Democratic members of Con-
gress.
While few Republican lawmak-
ers had anything critical to say
about Mr. Trump in public after
the El Paso and Dayton shoot-
ings, the party harbors profound
private anxieties about the im-
pact of his conduct on the 2020elections. During last year’s
midterm elections, Mr. Trump
campaigned insistently on a
slashing message about illegal
immigration, and was rewarded
with a sweeping rejection of his
party across the country’s di-
verse cities and prosperous
suburbs.
Punctuating the final weeks of
the 2018 elections were a pair of
traumatic events that may have
deepened voters’ feelings of
dismay about the president’s
violent language and appeals to
racism: a failed wave of at-
tempted bombings by a Trump
supporter aimed at the presi-
dent’s critics, and a mass shoot-
ing at the Tree of Life Synagogue
in Pittsburgh, carried out by a
gunman who had railed about
immigrant “invaders.”
Mr. Trump responded to the
Pittsburgh massacre in a tone
similar to the one he used on
Monday, lamenting the “terrible,
terrible thing, what’s going on
with hate in our country,” before
taking up his caustic message
again on the campaign trail. He
paid no price for that approach
with his largely rural and white
political base, which has re-
mained fiercely supportive of his
administration through all man-
ner of adversity, error and scan-
dal.
In the Democratic presidential
race, the weekend of bloodshed
had the effect of muting, at least
temporarily, the divisions in the
party that were showcased in
last week’s debates. The out-
break of solidarity may not last,
but it underscored how much the
2020 campaign is likely to take
shape in reaction to Mr. Trump’s
worldview and behavior.
Even as they aired their dis-
agreements last week, some
Democrats appeared to recog-
nize that political reality. In fact,
on the morning after his party’s
back-to-back debates concluded,
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington
State predicted to a reporter in
Detroit that his party would have
little difficulty rallying together
in the 2020 election.
“We’ve got the most unifying
gravitational force, outside of a
black hole,” Mr. Inslee remarked,
“and that’s a white nationalist in
the White House.”NEWS ANALYSISBacklash to Extremism
Pressures the President
President Trump condemned
white supremacy on Monday
after facing criticism over the
echoes of his own language in
the El Paso gunman’s anti-
immigrant manifesto.DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMESFrom Page AEl Paso and Dayton Shootings