Speaking in the aftermath of back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, Acting White House Chief of Staff said on ABC's "This Week" Sunday that white supremacists are mentally ill and that President Donald Trump knows that.
"There are people in this country this morning thinking that President Trump was (made) happy by this," Mulvaney said in an interview with Jonathan Karl on the ABC Sunday morning show. "That's a sad, sad state of this nation. He's angry. He's upset. He wants it to stop.
"I don't think it's at all fair to sit here and say that he doesn't think that white nationalism is bad for the nation. These are sick people. You cannot be a white supremacist and be normal in the head," Mulvaney said. "These are sick people. You know it, I know it, the president knows it. And this type of thing has to stop. And we have to figure out a way to fix the problem, not figure out a way to lay blame."
"The president is just as saddened by this as you are," Mulvaney said. "The president is just as angry by this as you are, and wants to do something about it just as much as everybody else does."
Beto O'Rourke, the former congressman from El Paso, his successor in Congress, Veronica Escobar, and his fellow presidential candidate, Julian Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio, all appeared, separately, on the same show, and Mulvaney was responding to the criticism from them and others that the president and his rhetoric on race and immigration had fostered a climate that made the killings in El Paso at least, which appear to be hate crime, more likely.
"You've said that the president is fueling hate in this country," Karl said to O'Rourke, who had returned to El Paso from the campaign trail on word of the tragedy back home. "Are you suggesting that he bears responsibility for what we just saw in El Paso?"
"I am because he does," O'Rourke replied. "Someone who describes Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, who has sought to ban 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 in El Paso, Texas. There's been a rise in hate crimes every single one of the last three years in this country. And it is not solely because of President Trump. It is Fox News, it is the warnings of invasions that we hear on that channel, it's these groups on the internet."
"But for the commander-in-chief of this country, the person in the highest position of public trust to say these kinds of things _ it's not just here in El Paso, it's the Tree of Life massacre at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, the shooter who cited the caravans that the president has warned us about, the fear that George Soros was financing those caravans, something that, again, President Trump encouraged," O'Rourke said. Or the fact that the Christchurch shooter in New Zealand also cited President Trump and the Islamophobia that he seeks to incite in this country and around the world. All of this is connected."
"And if we just accept this as a natural disaster, just what our fate and our fortune and our future is in this country, we will get more of the same," O'Rourke said. "So in addition to sensible gun policies _ and we must adopt and sign those into law _ 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 offered a similar assessment of the president's culpability.
"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," Castro said. "That's how he believed that he won in 2016. And it's no accident that, just a few weeks after he announced his 2020 reelection bid, there he was he indulging and entertaining this 'send her bac,' chant. And he's spoken about immigrants as being invaders."
"He's given license for this toxic brew of white supremacy to fester more and more in this country. And we're seeing the results of that," Castro said. "Look, there's one person that's responsible directly for that shooting in El Paso. And that's the shooter. At the same time, as our national leader, you have a role to play in either fanning the flames of division or trying to bring Americans of different backgrounds together."
"Most presidents have chosen to try and bring people together," Castro said. "This president very early on made a clear choice to divide people for his own political benefit. And these are some of the consequences that we're seeing of that.
Castro said that the early evidence is that shooter made the long drive from Allen, Texas, to target Hispanics in a border community that has been thrust into the national spotlight because of the political debate over immigration, the border wall and the detention and separation of families who illegally crossed the border.
"The fact that he went to a Walmart where it was basically a heavily Hispanic shopping base there, the people who were shopping there are overwhelmingly Latino, it's right near the Mexican border ... you can see Mexico, literally see Mexico from the parking lot of this Walmart So this shooter must have known what he was doing. And he wasn't from El Paso. He traveled from Allen, Texas, more than nine hours away to go specifically there. 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?"
Escobar said the Walmart is "the store that my mom shops at. She lives just blocks away. It's the store that my family and I shop at. And so there's no surprise that it was very, very busy. It was a typical Saturday, people just going about their business. It also is a store where a lot of our neighbors and friends and family members from across the border come to shop."
"We are, again, a binational community, where we are one region separated by a river, but where we share family roots, history, tradition, economies in many respects," Escobar said. "And so this _ the fact that this store was targeted _ I believe, was not coincidental."
And Escobar said, "we have a very different philosophy in El Paso from the philosophy that emanates from the White House. We embrace one another and take care of one another."
Mulvaney pushed back against the argument that Trump had created a dangerous national climate.
"Would anyone blame Bernie Sanders for the congressional baseball game shooting? No, I don't think so. Did anyone blame (New York Congresswoman) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the gentleman _ for the crazy guy who tried to blow up the DHS office in Washington state, taking I think a homemade bomb and an AR-15 to shoot up what he called a concentration camp, the exact same rhetoric that AOC was using?" Muvlaney asked. "Did anybody blame her?
"The people responsible here are the people who pull the trigger.," Mulvaney said. "We need to figure out how to create less of those kinds of people as a society and not trying to figure out who gets blamed going into the next election."
Karl cited for Mulvaney a statement that Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush tweeted after the El Paso massacre, which has drawn attention for its blunt language coming from a Republican.
"I believe fighting terrorism remains a national priority. And that should include standing firm against white terrorism," Bush said. "There have now been multiple attacks from self-declared white terrorists here in the US in the past several months. This is a real and present threat that we must all denounce and defeat."
Karl asked Mulaney, "Why has the president downplayed the threat of white nationalism?"
"I don't think he has. Look at what he said yesterday," Mulvaney responded. "He condemned this without reservation whatsoever."
Karl noted that in March Trump was asked, "Do you see today white nationalism as a rising threat around the world?"
And his answer, Karl said. "I don't really. I think it's a small group of people that have a very, very serious problem."
"I don't believe that's downplaying it," Mulvaney said. "Look, this is not the same as international nuclear weapons. This is a serious problem. There's no question about it. But they are sick, sick people. And the president knows that. I don't think it's fair to try and lay this at the feet of the president."
In a statement, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said that, "as the so of a Cuban immigrant, I am deeply horrified by the hateful anti-Hispanic bigotry expressed in the shooter's so-called 'manifesto.'"
"This ignorant racism is repulsive and anti-American," Cruz said. "What we saw yesterday was a heinous act of terrorism and white supremacy."
Meanwhile, on Fox News, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said that the El Paso mass shooting was "obviously a hate crime, I think, in my view against immigrants." But he devoted most of his 12-minute interview to laying blame on the pernicious influence of video games like "Call of Duty," which he said apparently absorbed the El Paso shooter, who turned the simulated killing he played at into the real thing Saturday, and to what Patrick said was the banishing of God from the public schools and the public square.
Those remarks, and Gov. Greg Abbott's remarks Saturday in El Paso, applying a mental health frame to looking at shootings like this, drew the ire of Julie Oliver, an Austin Democrat who is running for Congress in the 25th Congressional District.
"This is not a mental heath issue. This is not a video games issue. This is not a prayer in schools issue," said Oliver. "This was an act of white supremacist nationalism and calling it anything else dishonors the victims and their families."
