Trump is going to Dayton in the morning and will visit El Paso later in the day. The White House has not released a full schedule of his activities in the two cities, but Tuesday evening, the president’s press secretary declared that the day would “be about honoring victims, comforting communities and thanking first responders and medical professionals for their heroic actions.”
That wasn’t the message that Trump wanted to deliver Wednesday morning as he ignored calls from community leaders and residents to stay away. Around midnight, he attacked Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic presidential candidate, on Twitter, mocking him for having a “phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage” and boasting that he “trounced him” when Trump held a rally in El Paso in February.
In a tweet on Wednesday morning, the president attacked the “Failing New York Times” and the “Radical Left Democrats” over a headline in The Times. A few minutes later, Trump quoted a conservative television news outlet’s reporting that “the Dayton, Ohio, shooter had a history of supporting political figures like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and ANTIFA.”
As he left the White House to travel to the two cities, Trump dismissed his critics as nothing more than “political people that are trying to make points” and mocked them for being “very low in the polls.”
The president’s Twitter outbursts underscored the complaints of O’Rourke and others who have said Trump was not welcome in their communities because his presence would inflame tensions rather than soothe them.
Before leaving, he lashed out at the mayor of Dayton, calling her a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and of antifa, a radical leftist group. The president also rejected calls to abandon the way he talks about immigrants, saying that “illegal immigration is a terrible thing for this country” and insisting that “we have very many people coming in. They are pouring in to this country.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.