Dr. Julio Novoa, left, and Danielle Novoa, right, kneel beside a makeshift memorial with their 10-month-old son Ricard Novoa at the scene of a mass shooting at a shopping complex in El Paso, Texas. | John Locher/AP Photo 2020 Elections Trump rhetoric freshly condemned after mass shootings 2020 candidates and other politicians battle over the president's words about minorities, while the Justice Department pursues the El Paso killings as domestic terrorism.

The Justice Department on Sunday said it was treating a mass shooting in Texas as domestic terrorism, while 2020 candidates and politicians across the spectrum, frustrated by a string of deadly shootings, battled over President Donald Trump’s rhetoric on minorities and whether it is encouraging violence.

“There’s a statutory definition of domestic terrorism — this meets it,” John Bash, the U.S. attorney for West Texas, said at a news conference. “It appears to be designed to intimidate a civilian population, to say the least.”


Kerri Kupec, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, followed up on Twitter: “At #elpasoshooter press conference, @USAttyBash says working closely with AG Barr, @TheJusticeDept treating as domestic terrorism case. Calls for swift and certain justice. including death penalty.”

Democratic candidates were unsparing in assessing blame, with former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas leading the way. He said on Sunday that responsibility for the shooting in his hometown of El Paso the day before — one of two in 24 hours that left at least 29 dead — fell on President Donald Trump and his racial rhetoric, accusing the president of “encouraging” such acts of violence.

In addition to shoring up gun control laws, O’Rourke said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “we have to acknowledge the hatred, the open racism that we’re seeing,” adding that “there is an environment of it in the United States.”

Nearly half a dozen other presidential contenders — including Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and Julián Castro, the only Hispanic candidate in the 2020 Democratic field — also placed blame on Trump for his rhetoric.

“He is ripping at our nation,” Booker said on CNN, repeatedly using the word “failing” and saying the president “must be held responsible.”

Castro added that “I believe that President Trump is making it worse,” and Buttigieg said the president was “condoning and encouraging white nationalism.”

Those attacks on the president suggested a gloves-off approach in responding to a string of horrific mass shootings in Texas, Ohio and California during a summer in which political rhetoric has repeatedly and insistently dropped into the gutter.

On Saturday afternoon, a gunman opened fire outside of a WalMart in a busy shopping center in El Paso, which sits just across the border from Mexico and has a large Latino population. Police say that the attack killed at least 20 and wounded two dozen others. The suspect, identified as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, is in custody. Authorities are working to see whether Crusius is the author of a racist, anti-immigrant manifesto posted online shortly before the attack, and whether hate crime charges should be filed.

Hours later, a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, left nine dead and injured dozens. Police have identified that shooter, who was killed by responding officers, as 24-year-old Connor Betts. Authorities have not determined a motive for that attack. The killings Saturday and Sunday came less than a week after three were killed and a dozen others wounded when a gunman opened fire at a garlic festival in Gilroy, Calif.

Though Trump tweeted throughout the weekend, he was out of sight and at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., during the two back-to-back mass shootings. On Sundays afternoon, before heading back to the White House, he denounced both attacks, telling reporters that “hate has no place in our country” and vowing to “take care of it.”

He offered his condolences to members of both communities and said he’d been in touch with lawmakers from both states, as well as spoken with Attorney General William Barr “at length” and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Trump also praised law enforcement, telling reporters in New Jersey that “nobody could have done what they've done. This could have been — as bad as it was, it could have been so much worse. I just have to thank them.”

The president made no mention of white supremacism on Sunday and focused instead on mental illness. He also didn't say anything about the critics laying blame at his feet, but appeared to allude to it by noting that “this has been going on for years. For years and years in our country.”

He demurred when asked what his administration planned to do about the shootings. He said he would be making a statement on Monday morning, though Trump has always struggled with the role of a president who consoles the nation during tragedies like these.

Law enforcement officials block a road at the scene of a mass shooting at a shopping complex on Aug. 4, 2019, in El Paso, Texas. | John Locher/AP Photo

“We're talking to a lot of people and a lot of things are in the works, and a lot of good things,” he said.

The president earlier on Sunday had called both weekend shootings “senseless attacks” and ordered flags to be flown at half-staff through Thursday.

“We condemn these hateful and cowardly acts,” he said in a proclamation. “Through our grief, America stands united with the people of El Paso and Dayton. May God be with the victims of these two horrific crimes and bring aid and comfort to their families and friends.”

The weekend’s rampages are not the first time Trump’s rhetoric has been tied to violence as a possible motivating factor or a catalyst for attacks. But they come as Trump continues to lean on racist tropes as he runs for reelection.

O’Rourke, who left the presidential campaign trail to return home in the wake of the El Paso shooting, repeatedly accused Trump of using language more commonly found during Hitler’s Third Reich, but also said that the president’s rhetoric was commonly found on the internet and even Fox News.

“He is encouraging this,” O’Rourke told host Jake Tapper of CNN. “He doesn’t just tolerate it; he encourages it, calling immigrants rapists and criminals and seeking to ban all people of one religion.”

“Folks are responding to this. It doesn't just offend us, it encourages the violence we're seeing including in my hometown of El Paso yesterday.”

Castro, another presidential candidate from Texas, echoed some of O’Rourke‘s statements. He said that while the shooter was “responsible directly for that shooting in El Paso,” the president had created an environment that made the shooting possible.

“Anybody who has the ability to see and hear and understand what the president has been doing since he started his campaign in 2015 knows that division and bigotry and fanning the flames of hate has been his political strategy,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Castro added: “He’s given license for this toxic brew of white supremacy to fester more and more in this country. And we’re seeing the results of that.”

He also said he was convinced that it was indeed a hate crime. “You can see Mexico — literally see Mexico from the parking lot of this WalMart,” he told host Jonathan Karl. “So this shooter must have known what he was doing.”

Booker said Trump was “savagely fraying the bonds of our nation,” in an extended attack on what he said were the president’s moral failings.

“Our president right now is using the same language of racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” Booker said, adding: “He himself is using the language of hate.”

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Booker told host Chuck Todd: “To say nothing in a time of rising hatred, it’s not enough to say, ‘I’m not a hate monger myself.’ If you are not actively working against hate, calling it out, you are complicit in what is going on.”

O’Rourke outlined a litany of instances by the president in which he has derided minorities or immigrants, including Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. during the 2016 presidential campaign, his assertion that there were “very fine people” on both sides of a 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., that turned violent, and Trump’s more recent attacks on lawmakers of color.

“These are white men motivated by the kind of fear that this president traffics in,” O’Rourke argued in referring to a spate of domestic terrorism episodes targeting minorities.

Asked whether O’Rourke agreed with a fellow presidential hopeful, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, that Trump is a white nationalist, he answered in the affirmative.

“Yes. I do. And again, from some of the record that I just recited to you, the things that he has said both as a candidate and then as the president of the United States, this cannot be open for debate,” he said, telling Tapper that “you as well as I have a responsibility to call that out, to make sure that the American people understand what is being done in their name by the person who holds the highest position of public trust in this land.”

Ryan stopped short of accusing Trump of being a white nationalist, but argued that he didn’t necessarily need to be one himself to motivate other white supremacists to violence.

Mourners gather at a vigil following a nearby mass shooting Aug. 4, 2019, in Dayton, Ohio. | John Minchillo/AP Photo

“Well, the white nationalists think he's a white nationalist, and that's the crux of the problem. They support him. The David Dukes of the world support him,” he said on “State of the Union,” referring to Trump’s endorsement from the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. “They said he's going to implement their agenda. That's all you need to know.”

Whether Trump means it or not, Ryan said, the president’s language is “causing killings happening here in the United States. ... And he has to bear responsibility.”

While reviewing Trump’s rhetoric against immigrants, nearly every candidate referred to leaked private comments Trump made to Republican senators early in his term in which he referred to majority-black countries as “shithole countries” and wondered why the U.S. didn’t have more immigrants from majority-white countries.

“More than anything, of the laws and the executive orders, presidents of the United States, they create culture,” Ryan said. “And that culture can say, ’We're going to reach for the stars and we're going to go to the moon,’ or that culture can be, ’Go back to where you came from or you come from a shithole country,’” Ryan said.

Mick Mulvaney, the president’s acting chief of staff, offered a forceful defense of his boss on Sunday, dismissing the accusations being leveled at Trump as political attacks.

In appearances on “This Week” and “Meet the Press,” Mulvaney accused Democrats of employing a double standard when it came to Trump, referencing a Bernie Sanders supporter who opened fire on Republican lawmakers in 2017 and an attempted attack on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Washington state carried out by a man echoing language used by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

“Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Beto O’Rourke, a former colleague of mine, who I hold in high regard, is running for president and the — to the extent he can make this an issue, he’s going to,” Mulvaney said on “This Week” of his fellow former House member.

Of Booker, Mulvaney declared that he wanted to have substantive conversations on addressing gun violence and would not be “giving Cory Booker a chance to run for president this morning by blaming Donald Trump.”

Because of a technical glitch, Mulvaney appeared on “Meet the Press” toward the end of the show, but sounded off on what he’d been listening to in the meantime.

“I know this is a political show, but the level of rhetoric in the last 20 minutes, I hope someone else is bothered by it, other than me,” he said, calling the heated rhetoric he’d listened to from Booker and the show’s panelists “really disappointing.”

“I mean, we’ve moved straight past any sympathy at all for victims, straight past going into what caused this and trying to figure out who’s to blame,” he added, becoming exasperated as Todd pressed him on whether Trump’s rhetoric was even partially to blame for the attacks.

“I blame the people who pulled the trigger, Chuck, goodness gracious. I mean, is someone really blaming the president?” he asked, noting that the manifesto potentially linked to the El Paso rampage explicitly said that the author harbored racist sentiments before Trump’s rise to power.

Mulvaney also pointed out that as president, Trump had banned bump stocks, a tool that essentially could convert a semiautomatic weapon into an automatic one, and had signed at least one background-check bill. The president also alluded to this on Sunday, saying that gun control measures he had enacted were “just not really talked about very much.”

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) offered a more measured criticism of how quickly Democrats had seized on the shootings to press for gun control, endorsing a different approach.

“The first thing I’d say is that we need to take a step back from politicizing every event,” he said. “This is an issue of human hate — something that resides in the heart and that is actually, unfortunately because of social technology and social media, we’re seeing it connect it to other folks who have hate in their heart as well.”

Other than Mulvaney, Scott and Rep. Will Hurd, whose Texas border district is just outside of El Paso, Sunday’s political talk shows were empty of big Republican names. Tapper began his show by listing Republican lawmakers who declined invitations to appear to discuss the shootings.

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Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser, similarly condemned the attacks, writing that “white supremacy, like all other forms of terrorism, is an evil that must be destroyed.” She also endorsed the call on Twitter by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) for the enactment of so-called red flag laws that give law enforcement greater authority to confiscate weapons from those deemed dangerous.

Congressional leaders also railed against Trump’s heated rhetoric, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) echoing pleas for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to call senators back from their August recess to pass background-check legislation.

In a statement, Schumer also took a swipe at the president: “When President Trump spends more time and energy denouncing Rep. Elijah Cummings and Baltimore than he does denouncing right-wing extremists who often traffic in hate and white nationalism, it shows his priorities are un-American and way off balance.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) whacked McConnell for not taking up background-check legislation passed by her chamber months ago.

“We have a responsibility to the people we serve to act,” she said in a tweet. “The @SenateGOP must stop their outrageous obstruction & join the House to put an end to the horror and bloodshed that gun violence inflicts every day in America.”

McConnell made no mention of the calls, which he is unlikely to heed, in a tweet calling the attacks “sickening.” The majority leader's office later disclosed that the senator had fallen and fractured his shoulder at one point in the day, but had been in contact with senators in Texas and Ohio.

Nancy Cook contributed to this report.