Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters urged opponents of the president over the weekend to confront and protest members of Trump’s Cabinet. | Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images Trump calls Maxine Waters the new 'face of the Democrats'

President Donald Trump declared on Tuesday that Rep. Maxine Waters is now “the face of the Democrats,” pushing forward a budding feud with the California congresswoman who last weekend urged opponents of the president to protest members of his Cabinet wherever they encounter them.

Trump appeared eager to tie Waters’ remarks to the rest of the Democratic Party, even though party leaders, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), have sought to distance themselves from her comments.


“The face of the Democrats is now Maxine Waters who, together with Nancy Pelosi, have established a fine leadership team,” the president wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning. “They should always stay together and lead the Democrats, who want Open Borders and Unlimited Crime, well into the future....and pick Crooked Hillary for Pres.”

Trump's social media post was the latest salvo in the back-and-forth between himself and Waters, who on Monday denied that she had encouraged anyone to "harm" Trump administration officials — as the president suggested she had — and accused Trump of twisting her words.

"I believe in peaceful, very peaceful protests," she told reporters on Capitol Hill, according to CNN. "I have not called for the harm of anybody. This President has lied again when he's saying that I've called for harm."

Waters (D-Calif.) said in a speech Saturday in Los Angeles: "If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere"

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Those remarks drew criticism from allies of the president and prompted Trump himself to write on Twitter that Waters had “just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement."

And while the California congresswoman denied she was trying to incite violence, members of her own party appeared to distance themselves from her comments, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who said Waters’ call for liberals to publicly hound Trump advisers was “not right” and “not American.”

"The president's tactics and behavior should never be emulated,” Schumer said in a floor speech on Monday. “It should be repudiated by organized, well-informed and passionate advocacy."

Waters’ initial remarks were fueled by outrage over the Trump administration’s immigration policy, which has resulted in thousands of children being separated from their parents after crossing into the U.S. illegally.

The California lawmaker’s call for protests against Trump administration officials also came as such confrontations ramped up, including last week inside a Mexican restaurant at which Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen was eating. More recently, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a Lexington, Virginia, restaurant, an incident that prompted the president to suggest online that the restaurant’s cleanliness was not up to par.

On Monday, Waters said she had no control over how people might protest the administration but argued that, contrary to complaints about a lack of civility in the type of political discourse she had encouraged, “protest is civility. … Protest is about peaceful resistance to the kind of actions that we are experiencing."

"I have nothing to do with the way people decide to protest," the lawmaker said. "I have no way of telling people how to protest, what they should protest. Again, it started with the restaurateur, it started with people in a restaurant. I did not create that, I did not design that, but I support their right to protest."