White House hopeful Beto O’Rourke on Wednesday said that President Trump is a white supremacist, shortly ahead of Trump’s visit to El Paso, Texas, following a mass shooting that killed 22 people Saturday.
“He is. He’s also made that very clear,” the former Texas congressman said when asked by MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff if the term was accurate.
“He’s dehumanized or sought to dehumanize those who do not look like or pray like the majority here in this country. He said I wish we had more immigrants from Nordic countries because those from Haiti bring AIDS, those from Africa come from shithole nations. He’s been very clear about who he prefers to be in this country and who he literally wants to keep out with walls and cages,” O’Rourke added.
O’Rourke’s designation of Trump as a white supremacist is the latest of several attacks the former congressman has lobbed at the president since the deadly shooting at a local Walmart that also left dozens injured.
Patrick Wood Crusius, the suspected gunman, drove eight hours from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to El Paso, which is directly across the border from Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez and has a high concentration of Hispanic people.
Crusius allegedly wrote a racist, anti-immigrant manifesto before the attack, which described fears of a Latino “invasion.”
The attack is being investigated as a hate crime.
Many, including O’Rourke, have highlighted similarities between Trump’s immigration rhetoric and the phrases in the alleged manifesto.
O’Rourke on Wednesday said that mass shootings such as the the one in El Paso were inevitable because of Trump’s rhetoric.
“It will happen again because what happened in El Paso was not an isolated incident,” he said. “After the president warned of caravans, you had someone go into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh warning of caravans. You had the mosque in Victoria, Texas, burned to the ground on the day that Trump signed his executive order seeking to ban Muslim travel to the United States. There are very real consequences to his words.”