Beto Says Attacks Like El Paso Will Happen Again As Long As Trump Is In Office

2020 presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke said that as long as President Donald Trump is in office, mass shootings like the one Saturday in El Paso, Texas, will happen again.

Two mass shootings killed a total of 31 people Saturday and Sunday in Texas and Ohio. Trump visited Dayton, Ohio, where one shooting took place, earlier Wednesday. He also visited El Paso Wednesday.

Former Texas Rep. O’Rourke told MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff that as long as Trump remains in office, shootings like these will continue to happen.

“It will happen again because what happened in El Paso is not an isolated incident,” O’Rourke said. “There are very real consequences to his words, to his tweets, to the racism that he fans. You saw this in May at a rally in Florida, he says, ‘How are we going to stop these people’ — meaning these immigrants — ‘from coming to this country?’ Someone yells out ‘shoot ’em!’ The crowd roars with approval, and he laughs, says, ‘That’s okay with me.’”

O’Rourke also said Wednesday that Trump is a white supremacist and that he has “dehumanized” people who don’t look or pray like “the majority here in this country.” He has blamed the president for the mass shooting.

“Again, we in El Paso have born the brunt of all of that but we in El Paso are standing up to all of that and I have never been more proud of this community than I have in this moment,” O’Rourke told Soboroff on “Deadline: White House” Wednesday.

Trump arrived in El Paso Wednesday afternoon to visit survivors of Saturday’s shootings. Before the visit, he was in Dayton where he visited survivors from that attack.