Beto O’Rourke & Julian Castro slam President Trump over mass shootings

Both 2020 presidential candidates from Texas responded to the mass shooting in El Paso by criticizing President Trump and calling for stricter gun control legislation.

Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman who represented El Paso, accused Trump of encouraging racism through his inflammatory rhetoric.

He was asked Sunday on CNN, “Do you think President Trump is a white nationalist?”

“Yes. I do,” O’Rourke replied. “The things that he has said both as a candidate and then as the President of the United States, this cannot be open for debate,” he said. “We have a problem with white nationalist terrorism in the United States of America today,” adding that “these are white men motivated by the kind of fear that this President traffics in.”

When asked Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” if he thinks the president bears responsibility for the mass shooting in El Paso, O’Rourke said “Someone who describes Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, who has sought to ban all — all Muslims, all people of one religion — from traveling to the United States or who calls Nazis and white supremacists very fine people — he doesn’t just tolerate, he encourages the kind of open racism and the violence that necessarily follows that we saw here.”

O’Rourke left the campaign trail to return to his hometown on Saturday night. He toured one of the hospitals that had taken in victims of the shooting. At a news conference on Sunday, he described having seen a woman who was shot in the chest, as well as her mother and aunt who were also victims of the shooting.

“It’s incredibly heartbreaking to see what these families are going through right now,” he said. (Watch Beto’s remarks to reporters in El Paso on Sunday in the video player below.)

In a separate interview Sunday with ABC News, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julin Castro — also a Texan — placed blame with the president’s rhetoric too.

“Anybody who has the ability to see and hear and understand what the president has been doing since he started his campaign in 2015 knows that division and bigotry and fanning the flames of hate has been his political strategy,” he said. “That’s how he believes that he won in 2016.”

Castro also said “the evidence points to the idea that it was a hate crime.”

“[The shooter] traveled from Allen, Texas, more than nine hours away to go specifically there,” he added. “There was a very Hispanic-heavy area. So it certainly looks like a hate crime. And now the important thing is what are we going to do about it?” Castro asked.

O’Rourke called for “sensible gun policies” and added that “we also need to connect the dots on this hatred and racism that is coming from the highest positions of power in this country.”

Castro brought up Texas’s concealed carry laws and noted that the threat of other armed individuals did not discourage the attack.

“This happened in Texas, where we have concealed carry, we have open carry, we have campus carry, we have one of the highest rates of gun ownership,” he said. “That shooter knew that he was walking into a situation where a lot of folks there could be carrying a weapon. That didn’t stop him. The answer is not more guns. The answer is to make sure that these weapons of war, these semiautomatic weapons, don’t get into the hands of people who go and use them on the street.”