Beto O’Rourke, current 2020 U.S. presidential candidate, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, serving Texas’ 16th district, and former member of the El Paso, Texas, City Council, is sick and tired of the media asking if Donald Trump is racist—and he made that plain in the wake of the devastating mass shooting that shocked his hometown Saturday morning.
During a vigil for the 20 people killed when Patrick Crusius, 21, traveled almost 9 hours from Dallas to the border town of El Paso to specifically target Latinx immigrants he said were “invading” the country, O’Rourke had this to say when a reporter asked if there were anything that Trump could do to make “any of this” better.
“What do you think? You know the s— he’s been saying. He’s been calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. I don’t know, like, members of the press, what the f—? Hold on a second. You know, I…it’s these questions that you know the answers to. I mean, connect the dots about what he’s been doing in this country.
“He’s not tolerating racism, he’s promoting racism,” O’Rourke continued. “He’s not tolerating violence, he’s inciting racism and violence in this country. So, you know, I just — I don’t know what kind of question that is. You guys know the answers to these questions.”
After news of his remarks began to make the rounds, O’Rourke took to Twitter to reiterate that he said what he said.
In an MSNBC interview Monday morning, O’Rourke likened Trump to Hitler’s Third Reich, saying: “The president has not been shy. He has not been saying this behind closed doors. This is out in the open. You know, [Trump saying that] all people, of one religion, are inherently defective and should be banned from the shores of this country…the only modern Western democracy that I can think of that said anything close to this is the Third Reich, Nazi Germany.”
The similarities in ideological and institutional violence makes sense, considering that Adolf Hitler patterned his Third Reich after the Jim Crow South—not the other way around.
O’Rourke continued: “[Trump] talks about human beings as though they are animals, making them subhuman, to make it okay to put their kids in cages…we’ve lost seven children in our custody just over the last year, in this, the wealthiest, the most powerful country on the face of the planet, saying that he wants more immigrants like those from Nordic countries, the whitest places on the face of the planet.”
As ESSENCE previously reported, First Lady Melania Trump née Melanija Knavs, later changed to Melania Knauss, first came to the U.S. from Slovenia in 1996, first using a tourist visa, then a string of working visas until becoming a U.S. citizen in 2006.
“This president, his open racism, is an invitation to violence,” the 2020 U.S. presidential candidate continued. “The writing has been on the wall since his maiden speech coming down that escalator describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. The actions that follow cannot surprise us—and anyone who is surprised is part of the problem right now.”