The
Democratic mayor of Portland, Oregon, said it is President Donald Trump who
"created the hate" in an unyielding attack on the White House
following a shooting at a protest that left one person dead. Wheeler's message
provoked a string of tweets from the President, who rebuked Wheeler's news
conference plea to Trump to let him, as mayor, handle the unrest
After Portland shooting, Trump and Biden allies
trade blame for clashes across the country
Republicans say more chaos and violence are in store
if Joe Biden is elected, while Democrats say what’s happening is “Donald
Trump’s America.”
By NOLAN D.
MCCASKILL
08/30/2020
01:35 PM EDT
Updated:
08/30/2020 06:52 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/30/portland-protests-405201
After a
fatal shooting in Portland, Ore., allies of President Donald Trump and former
Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday sought to attribute the violence and chaos
occurring amid protests across the country to the opposing candidate.
Republicans
framed the disorder surrounding demonstrations against police brutality and
racial injustice as a harbinger of what would come should Biden win the White
House in November. Democrats drove home the point that what’s happening on the
ground is a direct result of who’s already in the White House.
“The chaos
and the disorder and the lawlessness that we are currently seeing, that’s
Donald Trump’s America,” Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) said on CBS’ “Face the
Nation.”
At least a
half-dozen Democrats appeared across the spectrum of Sunday political talk
shows, where they condemned violence, pilloried the president and made clear
that he was responsible for what is happening in this country.
“We are not
safe in Donald Trump’s America,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota added on ABC’s
“This Week.”
White House
chief of staff Mark Meadows, however, maintained that it was “just not
accurate” to “reframe it that way.”
“You know,
you want to talk about Donald Trump’s America,” he said in an interview on
NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Most of Donald Trump’s America is peaceful.”
A man whose
hat bore the insignia of a far-right group called Patriot Prayer was fatally
shot late Saturday during a clash between Trump supporters and
counter-protesters, capping a violent week in America that began with a white
police officer shooting Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back seven times in
Kenosha, Wis., last Sunday. Two days later, a white teenager from Illinois
allegedly shot three people in Kenosha, killing two of them.
Protests
have occurred for more than 90 consecutive days in Portland since George Floyd,
another Black man, was killed by the police in Minneapolis in May. Portland
police have yet to release details of the man who was killed over the weekend
or any information about the suspected gunman.
On Sunday
afternoon, Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, held a news conference to denounce
the violence, pledging that the shooter would be arrested and prosecuted. He
asked the community to “pull together in the name of peace and humanity,” and
castigated Trump for language and actions that he blamed for sparking conflict.
“Do you
seriously wonder, Mr. President, why this is the first time in decades that
America has seen this level of violence?“ Wheeler said. “It's you who have
created the hate and the division. It's you who have not found a way to say the
names of Black people killed by police officers, even as people in law
enforcement have, and it‘s you who claimed that white supremacists are good
people. Your campaign of fear is as anti-democratic as anything you have done
to create hate and vitriol in our beautiful country.“
Trump for
weeks has painted Portland as a city whose leaders can’t control its citizens
or prevent protesters from destroying it. The president has sent federal agents
there to protect government property and control “anarchists and agitators,”
elevating confrontations between protesters and law enforcement as he calls for
law and order.
That
message was widespread at last week’s Republican National Convention, where
supporters warned of cities being overrun by violent mobs on the radical left.
With the coronavirus pandemic killing more than 180,000 Americans and battering
the economy, Republicans are trying to make safety a key campaign issue amid a
national reckoning on race relations, driving their message of law and order as
Democrats emphasize the need for police reform to halt the killings of unarmed
Black people.
Trump
tweeted on Saturday that “Kenosha has been very quiet” since the National Guard
entered the city, indicating the same would be true of Portland if its leaders
accepted the administration’s assistance.
“Our great
National Guard could solve these problems in less than 1 hour,” Trump tweeted
on Sunday. “Local authorities must ask before it is too late.”
Acting
Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said the administration was waiting for
the investigation of the Portland shooting to play out, but he also suggested
that the killing pointed to the larger issue of state and local officials “not
allowing law enforcement to do their job and really to bring this violent
activity night after night after night to a close.”
“As you see
that continue to unfold over the course of three months, you are going to
continue to see violent activity,” Wolf predicted on ABC. The administration is
“happy to provide resources to bring this violence to an end, violence that,
again, across the ideological spectrum, left or right, the violence needs to
end.”
Trump will
travel to Kenosha on Tuesday to meet with local law enforcement. Lara Trump,
the president’s daughter-in-law and a senior campaign adviser, said the
president had reached out to Blake’s family, but it is unclear whether they
will meet this week.
“I’m sure,
given the opportunity, he would be more than happy to do that,” she said on
“Fox News Sunday.” “But I haven’t gotten that information just yet.”
Despite
outgoing White House counselor Kellyanne Conway telling Fox News last week that
more chaos, anarchy, violence and vandalism were “better” for the president’s
campaign, Lara Trump said that violence was “never something any of us would
want to see happen.”
Recalling
what she described as an “anarchist mob” that encircled Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
and his wife outside of the White House after the president’s nomination
acceptance speech Thursday, Lara Trump said, “You didn’t see that happening on
the other side,” because “that would never happen.”
“It only
goes one way,” she added.
Rep. Karen
Bass (D-Calif.), who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, said Kenosha
shouldn’t be used as a way to campaign.
“I think
his visit has one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to agitate things
and to make things worse,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “What also
happened in Portland, too, you saw a parade of Trump supporters actually
actively shooting paintballs at peaceful protesters. And the president, in my
opinion, encourages that. He actually retweeted the people firing paint guns.
So, I think he only means to agitate things. He is campaigning.”
Biden, the
Democratic presidential nominee, is planning to address the nation this week in
a unifying speech that will showcase his leadership, according to his campaign,
but it is unclear whether he will travel to Wisconsin.
On Sunday
afternoon he denounced the Portland shooting and, more broadly, the violence
stemming from recent protests. He also called on Trump to take a similar
stance.
“The deadly
violence we saw overnight in Portland is unacceptable,” Biden said in a written
statement. “Shooting in the streets of a great American city is unacceptable. I
condemn this violence unequivocally. I condemn violence of every kind by any
one, whether on the left or the right. And I challenge Donald Trump to do the
same.“
Biden called
for unity and, like his allies, blamed Trump for encouraging division.
“We must
not become a country at war with ourselves,” Biden said in his statement. “A
country that accepts the killing of fellow Americans who do not agree with you.
A country that vows vengeance toward one another. But that is the America that
President Trump wants us to be, the America he believes we are.“
Portland
police hold back a man who was with the victim of a fatal shooting as he reacts
in minutes after the incident on August 29, 2020 in Portland, Oregon.
Portland
police hold back a man who was with the victim of a fatal shooting as he reacts
in minutes after the incident on August 29, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. | Nathan
Howard/Getty Images
To Conway’s
point, recent polling indicates that white suburban voters would feel less safe
in a Biden administration, something the Biden campaign rejects.
“I think
suburban voters are looking around at what’s going on in this country and
they’re looking at who’s in the White House and they’re seeing Donald Trump.
They don’t see Joe Biden,” Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager,
said on “Fox News Sunday.” “They see Donald Trump in the White House. This is
Trump’s America. The chaos that suburban voters are feeling and that voters all
across this country are feeling is a result of Donald Trump’s failed
leadership.”
Bedingfield
also accused Trump of trying to incite violence, and the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), told CNN that Trump was
“willfully fanning the flames of this violence.”
Trump began
his Sunday with a flurry of activity on social media, tweeting, retweeting and
quote-tweeting dozens of messages that ran the gamut from bashing Wheeler —
siding with a post that referred to him as a “useless f---ing idiot” — to
praising the caravan of supporters who drove into Portland over the weekend as
“GREAT PATRIOTS” and sharing a satirical news article that quoted Biden talking
to a department store mannequin.
In the afternoon,
the president referred to Wheeler on Twitter as “the dummy running Portland,”
and concluded: “The only way you will stop the violence in the high crime
Democrat run cities is through strength!“ Earlier in the day, he had retweeted
a post that gave Wheeler’s phone number and asked people to call it to tell him
to resign.
Additional
posts that appeared on the president’s timeline suggested that Wheeler should
resign “for committing war crimes,” that Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York should
be jailed and that Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C., should arrest
“agitators and thugs!” The president also reissued a call for “LAW &
ORDER!!!”
“It is
quite interesting to listen to President Donald John Trump talk about being the
law-and-order president when no one has violated the law in 2020 more than he
has,” said Demings, who served as an impeachment manager earlier this year and
sits on the House Intelligence and Judiciary panels. “We’re talking about a
president who just had his kickoff for his reelection on the grounds of the
White House. And we all know that that was a violation of law.”
Trump
campaigned on a pledge to restore safety, though Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.)
cautioned, “President Trump has a tendency to overpromise.”
Still,
Republicans insisted that chaos in Democratic-led cities was the fault of those
very Democrats, not the president. Meadows said the Trump administration had repeatedly
offered federal assistance to cities, help that was rejected in Portland.
“The
president is on the side of law enforcement and the rule of law,” Meadows said.
Trump on
Sunday morning also shared a post predicting that he could win as much as 16
percent of the Black vote, doubling the support he got in 2016.
Cedric
Richmond (D-La.), a Biden campaign co-chairman, said the president
“effectively” raised the question of what Black Americans have to lose by
supporting him in 2016.
“Black men
see clearly what they have to lose,” Richmond said on NBC. “They can get killed
and the president won’t say a word, won’t utter Jacob Blake’s name, will not
talk about police reform.”
“This is
his America. So how do you break this country and then run for reelection
saying, ‘I want to fix everything that I just destroyed?’” Richmond continued.
“And so that will be the message of the campaign, and we’re going to have to
make that case. But at the same time, I think America is in a real fragile point
and I think that you will hear Joe Biden speak, you will hear him try to heal
this country, because the president just doesn’t have it in him.”
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