El Paso Mayor throws up his hands over Donald Trump

| 9:50 pm EDT August 5, 2019
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It wasn’t enough that Donald Trump’s white supremacist rhetoric contributed to this past weekend’s mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. It wasn’t enough that Trump gave an embarrassing speech about it this morning. Now Trump wants to make things even worse by visiting El Paso as a political stunt, while the fallout from the shooting is still playing out.

El Paso Mayor Dee Margo announced today that Donald Trump will be visiting the city on Wednesday. To say that the mayor is less than enthused would be an understatement. CNN says that the mayor said “He is President of the United States, so in that capacity I will fulfill my obligation to meet with him” and that he’s receiving emails and phone calls protesting the visit, which is “why I’m saying what I’m saying now.”

What’s interesting here is that Mayor Margo is a Republican, which means he’s a member of Donald Trump’s political party. So the hesitance evident in his words isn’t due to partisanship, but rather the fact that even Republicans know Trump is at fault for this shooting, and that he only wants to visit the city so he can dishonestly grandstand about it.