While reacting to Saturday’s deadly El Paso, Texas shooting, 2020 Democratic presidential contender Tim Ryan compared the gunman’s alleged manifesto to the “kind of language that you hear at a Trump rally” and accused the president of “creating a culture and an environment in which this stuff keeps happening.”
Joining CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Ryan told host Jake Tapper, “You cannot not connect, the president of the United States and his rhetoric. I read that manifesto this morning a couple of times. The language in there is so similar to the kind of language that you hear at a Trump rally, you see in his tweets.
“The president isn’t just speaking to really smart people who are stable at his rallies,” he continued. “He’s speaking to the lowest common denominator, to where this jackass gets in a car and drives ten hours to go kill Latinos and Hispanics and Mexicans.”
2020 presidential candidate Tim Ryan reacts to mass shootings in Texas and Ohio: “We’re so dysfunctional… We passed universal background checks in the House of Representatives. It’s sitting at Mitch McConnell’s doorstep right now and he needs to act on it…” #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/NvB8uRsgUL
— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) August 4, 2019
Ryan made a similar point during another appearance on MSNBC the same day.
“I mean, when you read that manifesto, there were quotes in there that could have come out of a Donald Trump rally, and when you have the president talk about send them back and people are chanting send them back and this jackass drives ten hours to go shoot Mexicans, that’s a cultural problem the president is throwing jet fuel on making matters worse,” he said.
Ryan’s comments come after a gunman opened fire at an El Paso, Texas Walmart on Saturday, killing 20 people and injuring over a dozen more. The suspect, whom police took into custody without incident, is reported to have written an anti-immigrant manifesto hours before the shooting that outlined a desire to stop the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
Prosecutors are treating the incident as domestic terrorism and are seeking the death penalty.
