During a Friday morning interview, presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke criticized comments made by Julián Castro during Thursday night’s debate, characterizing his perceived attack on Joe Biden’s age as “petty.”
“I wasn’t really excited about that,” O’Rourke said of Castro’s remarks before immediately pivoting to an assertion that President Trump “directed” the massacre in El Paso this August that claimed the lives of more than 20 people.
“This threat that we have of Donald Trump, the racism and violence that he has welcomed out into the open, that he directed, essentially, to my hometown of El Paso, Texas, which killed 22 of the members of our community,” O’Rourke said was an example of the downside of rhetoric like that used by Castro on the debate stage.
O’Rourke has previously called Trump a white supremacist and a white nationalist while taking significant criticism from the president for his own nickname, “Beto,” which is most commonly used by people of Hispanic descent.
“The pettiness, the name-calling, the small ball politics, and that was an example of that last night, that’s not going to be up to this threat,” O’Rourke said of Castro’s attack on Biden. “That will not defeat Donald Trump.”
