Beto O'Rourke, back home in El Paso from the presidential campaign trail to share the grief of his hometown, was asked Sunday on ABC's "This Week" whether he was suggesting that President Donald Trump "bears responsibility" for a massacre that appears to have been a response by the shooter to fear of "the Hispanic invasion of Texas."

"I am," O'Rourke replied, "because he does."

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By Sunday morning, El Paso had been joined by Dayton, Ohio, as the scene of a horrific mass shooting, but the apparent motive in El Paso, and the connection to Trump's rhetoric, was plain to many Democrats, offering Democratic presidential candidates, including both O'Rourke and former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, fresh and compelling evidence to link the president's inflammatory words on race and immigration to an act of terrible violence.

"There is a toxic brew right now in the United States. And this is just one more example of that, of white nationalism," Castro said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"The manifesto that apparently this shooter wrote that says that Hispanics are taking over the state of Texas and changing the country, this echoes the kind of language that our president encourages, talking about invaders," Castro said. "And there are, you know, others who talk about people bringing disease and changing the culture, this idea of replacement."

The shooter chose a Walmart perched on the Mexican border with a largely Latino clientele in a city that Trump had chosen as the backdrop for a rally earlier this year in which he made the case for his border wall, retelling grisly stories of violent crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants.

"So this shooter must have known what he was doing," Castro said. "And he wasn't from El Paso. He traveled from Allen, Texas, more than nine hours away to go specifically there."

On Fox News, it was South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, another Democratic presidential contender, telling host Chris Wallace that "there’s no question that white nationalism is condoned at the highest level of our government."

"This is part of the climate where people who are in the grip of this hateful, extremist ideology feel validated and they feel validated from all the way at the top," Buttigieg said.

Another presidential candidate, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, was even blunter.

"We have a president of the United States who is particularly responsible," Booker said. "My faith has this idea that you reap what you sow. And he is sowing seeds of hatred in our country. And this harvest of hate and violence that we're seeing right now lies at his feet."

'White terrorist'

While the Democratic responses might have been predictable, Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush was quoted on one Sunday show after another for a statement he tweeted Saturday that went where Republicans don't go, describing the shooter as a "white terrorist."

"I believe fighting terrorism remains a national priority. And that should include standing firm against white terrorism," Bush said. "There have now been multiple attacks from self-declared white terrorists here in the U.S. in the past several months. This is a real and present threat that we must all denounce and defeat."

While Bush is the only member of his fabled family to have aligned his political fortunes with Trump, he is also Hispanic; his mother, Columba, is Mexican born.

Unlike the Democrats, Bush did not link the spike in white supremacist violence with the president's rhetoric.

Likewise, Texas' other most prominent Hispanic Republican, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz issued a statement saying that, "as the son of a Cuban immigrant, I am deeply horrified by the hateful anti-Hispanic bigotry expressed in the shooter's so-called 'manifesto.'"

"This ignorant racism is repulsive and anti-American," Cruz said. "What we saw yesterday was a heinous act of terrorism and white supremacy."

U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a freshman Republican from Houston, also tweeted: "White supremacy has no place in this world. Violence inflicted because of someone’s race or ethnicity is vile, repulsive, and one of the worst evils we face. It must end."

Mental health

Gov. Greg Abbott, who traveled to El Paso on word of the tragedy, focused on questions of mental health, an approach echoed by Trump addressing reporters in Morristown, N.J., Sunday. Trump plans to make a statement on the weekend's mass shootings Monday morning.

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In appearances on the NBC and ABC Sunday morning shows, the president's acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, identified white nationalism as a kind of mental illness.

"There are people in this country this morning thinking that President Trump was (made) happy by this," Mulvaney said on ABC. "That's a sad, sad state of this nation. He's angry. He's upset. He wants it to stop."

"I don't think it's at all fair to sit here and say that he doesn't think that white nationalism is bad for the nation. These are sick people. You cannot be a white supremacist and be normal in the head," Mulvaney said. "These are sick people. You know it, I know it, the president knows it. And this type of thing has to stop. And we have to figure out a way to fix the problem, not figure out a way to lay blame."

"The president is just as saddened by this as you are," Mulvaney said. "The president is just as angered by this as you are, and wants to do something about it just as much as everybody else does."

Meanwhile, on Fox News, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said that the El Paso mass shooting was "obviously a hate crime, I think, in my view against immigrants." But he devoted most of his 12-minute interview to laying blame on the influence of video games like "Call of Duty," which he said apparently absorbed the El Paso shooter, who turned the simulated killing he played at into the real thing Saturday, and to what Patrick said was the banishing of God from the public schools and the public square.

The response to the shootings by both Abbott and Patrick drew the ire of Julie Oliver, an Austin Democrat who is running for Congress in the 25th Congressional District, held by U.S. Rep. Roger Williams, R-Austin.

"This is not a mental health issue. This is not a video games issue. This is not a prayer in schools issue," Oliver said. "This was an act of white supremacist nationalism and calling it anything else dishonors the victims and their families."