A spokeswoman for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Tuesday criticized President Trump over his recent attack on the 2020 presidential hopeful, saying the move demonstrates Trump’s lack of leadership.
“It’s an attack that shows no leadership, no interest in actually supporting these people who are Americans and who [he] has a responsibility for as the president of the United States,” Briahna Joy Gray, a national press secretary for Sanders’s White House campaign, told Hill.TV. “And, frankly, it’s galling and shows that he has no credibility to be in that job.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to Hill.TV’s request for comment.
Trump, under fire for recent slams on Baltimore and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), lashed out at Sanders on Monday, saying he should be “labeled a Racist” for previously comparing Baltimore to a “Third World country.”
“Sanders recently equated the City of Baltimore to a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY,” Trump tweeted, referring to remarks the senator made in 2015 after touring the city following riots over the death of Freddie Gray, an African American man who died while in police custody.
“Based on that statement, I assume that Bernie must now be labeled a Racist, just as a Republican would if he used that term and standard!” Trump added.
Sanders shot back, saying “Trump’s lies never end.”
“While I have been fighting to lift the people of Baltimore and elsewhere out of poverty with good paying jobs, housing and health care, he has been attacking workers and the poor,” he tweeted.
Trump had earlier described the city as “disgusting” and “rodent infested,” an assessment widely denounced as racist by Democrats, including Sanders himself.
The president denied that these remarks were racist. Trump maintained Tuesday that, despite concerns over race-baiting, he said that his attacks are not part of a larger political strategy.
“There’s no strategy. I have no strategy. There’s zero strategy,” Trump told reporters Tuesday at the White House.
This isn’t the first time this month Trump has taken heat for his attacks on minority lawmakers.
Trump came under fire weeks ago after he told four progressive lawmakers, who are all women of color, to “go back” to where they came from. All four congresswomen — Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — are American citizens, and only Omar was born outside the U.S.
—Tess Bonn
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