Trump Faces Pressure on Gun Control in Secretive Dayton Visit
Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, who is from El Paso, said Trump shouldn’t visit.
(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump sought to console the grief-stricken residents of El Paso and Dayton on Wednesday, a trip that has so far been conducted largely out of public view following Democratic criticism of the president’s rhetoric on race and immigration and his positions on gun safety.
Journalists were not allowed to accompany Trump as he met with shooting victims, local officials, and police and other emergency workers at a Dayton hospital, and he made no public remarks while on the ground in Ohio.
Trump told people injured in the Dayton shooting that he was “with them,” according to his press secretary, Stephanie Grisham. She told reporters aboard Air Force One that none of the victims raised gun control with the president during his visit. She didn’t say whether Trump met with families of people killed in the shooting.
“Everybody received him very warmly,” she said. “Everybody was very, very excited to see him.”
But Trump was greeted by protests in the city, and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley confronted the president as soon as he arrived to demand he press Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hold a vote on House legislation that would expand background checks for gun buyers.
“I asked the president to promise to me and to the American people that he will sign that bill after he’s spoken out in support of it with Senator McConnell,” Brown said at a news conference after Trump’s visit. Trump didn’t make that commitment, Brown said, only saying “we will get things done,” according to the senator.
Trump’s social media director, Dan Scavino, attacked the two Democrats in a tweet, calling them “disgraceful politicians, doing nothing but politicizing a mass shooting, at every turn they can.”
Trump was “treated like a Rock Star inside the hospital,” Scavino said in a second tweet.
Trump also assailed Brown and Whaley in tweets, saying they were “misrepresenting what took place inside of the hospital.” But Brown said that Trump was received well by patients and staff of the hospital -- “he did the right things and Melania did the right things,” he said. Whaley said “the victims and the first responders were very grateful that the president of the United States came to Dayton.”
Between Dayton and El Paso, Trump also mocked former Vice President Joe Biden, who delivered a speech in Iowa in which he said Trump’s rhetoric on race and immigration has “fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation.”
“Sooo Boring!” Trump tweeted.
A pair of weekend shootings in the U.S. two cities left at least 31 people dead and dozens injured. Trump has never mastered the presidential art of consoling grieving survivors of disasters, and his job was made harder by his political connection to the El Paso attacker, who posted a racist manifesto online that borrowed language the president himself has used to demonize migrants and minority members of Congress.
Democrats have accused Trump of helping to incite the attack with his inflammatory remarks, and Brown said he initially had planned not to meet with Trump during his visit. “I didn’t in any way want to encourage the president’s racist talk, divisive talk,” he said.
But he decided it was important to try to harness Trump’s bully pulpit.
“If the president tells the Congress, pass an assault weapon ban, if the president says pass legislation for universal background checks, the Republican Congress and the Senate will move on it and the House will undoubtedly move on it,” Brown said.
Tension With Mayors
There was tension between Trump and the mayors of both cities before his trip. Dayton’s mayor, Whaley, criticized Trump’s remarks on the shootings on Monday, when he blamed the attacks on mental illness and video games and didn’t endorse any new gun-safety measures.
“His comments weren’t very helpful to the issue around guns,” Whaley said at a news conference on Tuesday. “If you just do mental health and don’t do gun work, on common-sense gun legislation, we will not be successful in this fight.”
Grisham said Whaley’s meeting with Trump was amicable, a statement that appeared to conflict with Brown’s account.
“Everything I saw between them was very warm,” Grisham said. “She thanked him for coming. She thanked the first lady. She thanked staff that we were all there. I didn’t see any other discussion, other than that.”
El Paso’s mayor, Dee Margo, was the subject of a Trump verbal attack earlier this year after he dismissed the president’s proposed wall on the Mexico border as ineffectual. Trump called him “full of crap” during a political rally in the city.
Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, who is from El Paso, said Trump shouldn’t visit, while Margo described his expected meeting with the president as a “formal duty.”
“I will continue to challenge any harmful and inaccurate statements made about El Paso,” Margo told reporters earlier this week.
‘Political Gain’
In a tweet before his departure Wednesday, Trump said the alleged Dayton shooter supported Democratic rivals Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, a de facto effort to tie them to that incident and diminish links between his own language and that of the El Paso suspect, who targeted Latino immigrants. There is no evidence the Dayton shooter, who was killed by police, had political motives.
Trump told reporters as he departed the White House on Wednesday that his critics “are looking for political gain” and that his divisive rhetoric on race and immigrants “brings people together.”
The U.S. experiences mass shootings at a pace that far exceeds any other developed nation, but Trump’s Republican Party has resisted policies that seek to limit civilian access to firearms.
Before departing Ohio, Trump endorsed expanded background checks for gun buyers but said there isn’t sufficient political support in Washington to re-enact a ban on sales of military-style rifles. Commonly known as the assault weapons ban, the prohibition expired in 2004.
It wasn’t clear if Trump would support the House-passed bill to expand background checks that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has blocked. “We’re exploring all options on many, many fronts,” Grisham said aboard Air Force One. Democrats have demanded McConnell bring forward the bill after the shootings; he has not indicated whether he’s reconsidering his opposition.
“There’s a great appetite” for action on background checks, Trump told reporters.
O’Rourke Feud
Trump suggested in a tweet on Monday that the legislation could be “married” to his proposals to restrict U.S. immigration, which are opposed by most Democrats -- a tactic that would raise the chances of both issues remaining stalled in Congress.
O’Rourke, who represented El Paso in Congress until his term expired in January, flatly rejected the idea. “Only a racist, driven by fear, could witness what took place this weekend — and instead of standing up to hatred, side with a mass murderer’s call to make our country more white,” O’Rourke said.
Trump responded in a tweet questioning O’Rourke’s use of the Hispanic nickname “Beto,” which he’s used since childhood, and mocking his lower-tier poll numbers. O’Rourke, Trump said on Twitter, “should respect the victims & law enforcement - & be quiet!”
O’Rourke fired back: “22 people in my hometown are dead after an act of terror inspired by your racism. El Paso will not be quiet and neither will I.”
In remarks at the White House on Monday, Trump condemned racism and white supremacy, though has not directly addressed overlap between his own anti-immigrant rhetoric and that of the El Paso shooting suspect.
--With assistance from Justin Sink.
To contact the reporter on this story: Josh Wingrove in Washington at jwingrove4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Joshua Gallu
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