Trump Can't Help but Try to Reignite an Ancient Feud With the Mayor of El Paso

By Rafi Schwartz  |  August 15, 2019 | 8:53pm
White House

When president Donald Trump visited El Paso last week, he did more than simply force himself into ghoulish photo ops with a community still reeling from the August 3 mass shooting that left 22 people dead, he also made time to be an asshole to the city’s Republican mayor.

In an interview with PBS Frontline published on Wednesday, Mayor Dee Margo said Trump went out of his way to insult him during a private meeting between the pair, after Margo pushed back on Trump’s false claims in his State of the Union address that El Paso was one of the most violent cities in the country before a border fence was installed in 2009.

“He said, ‘You’re a RINO [Republican in name only],’ and I said, ‘No, sir. I am not a RINO,’” Margo told PBS. “I said … ‘I simply corrected the misinformation you were given by [the Texas] attorney general, and that’s all I did.’”

It’s worth nothing that, given the president’s cult-like domination of the GOP, Trump is perversely correct in asserting that any divergence from his rhetoric, no matter how untethered to reality it may be, is decidedly un-Republican these days.

Semantics aside, though, let’s take a step back and put this in context: The president visits a city that’s just gone through one of the most horrific mass shootings in modern history—one that was in no small part inspired by his own racism—and uses the opportunity to pick a fight with a mayor from his own party, all because Trump himself was wrong about something way back in February.

That’s some psycho shit, to be sure. But, more than that, it’s just being a real dick.

 
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