For Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, it’s “really hard” for him to not view Donald Trump supporters as racist.
During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, the 2020 presidential hopeful criticized Trump’s rhetoric and his behavior in the aftermath of massacres in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.
Host Jake Tapper started off by saying, “You said to me last week that you thought President Trump was a white nationalist. I just wonder, sir, President Trump won your home state of Texas by nine points.” He then asked, “Almost 63 million Americans voted for him. Do you think it is racist to vote for President Trump in 2020?”
It took O’Rourke a while to respond.
He then said, “I think it’s really hard.”
“I think it’s really hard after everything that we’ve seen from his time as a candidate in 2016 to his repeated warnings of invasions to his repeated calls to send them back,” O’Rourke declared. “Sending back people who are U.S. citizens, sending back people who were born in this country.”
O’Rourke continued with his assertions that Trump is supposedly a bigot.
His description of white nationalists and klansmen and neo-Nazis as very fine people. His warnings of Muslims as being somehow inherently defective and attempting to ban them from entry into this country, and his transgender troop ban and his attack on anyone who does not look like or pray like or love like a majority of the country.
O’Rourke then asserted that Trump is “dangerous to the future of America and will destroy what makes us so unique.”
The former Congressman from El Paso has made it a habit to call Trump a white supremacist. He recently told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that Trump is making it “very clear” he is a white supremacist.
“He dehumanized those who do not look and pray like the majority of people here. He said I wish we had more immigrants from Nordic countries because those from Haiti bring AIDS, those from Africa are sh—— nations,” O’Rourke stated.
Although O’Rourke has been slipping in the polls lately, the recent El Paso shooting has given him a golden opportunity to politicize the incident and put himself in the spotlight.
In times when virtually all left-wing outlets are calling Trump a racist, it’s simply too hard for presidential candidates like O’Rourke to pass up an opportunity to lash out against Trump.