Democratic presidential hopefuls Former Vice President Joe Biden (L) and California Senator Kamala Harris (R) speak while Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders walks by after the third Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign season hosted by ABC News on Sept. 12, 2019. (ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images via JTA)
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Democratic candidates for the party’s presidential nomination linked President Donald Trump’s rhetoric to white supremacist violence, as they have in previous debates.
“He didn’t pull the trigger, but he’s certainly been tweeting out the ammunition,” Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., said of Trump at the debate Wednesday evening in Houston, referring to the Aug. 3 massacre in El Paso, Texas.
The alleged gunman, who targeted mostly Latinos, believed in theories that migrants were seeking to replace whites. The gunman who last year murdered 11 Jewish worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue also referred to “replacement” theories.
Other candidates linking Trump’s rhetoric to the attacks were Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman who is from El Paso, and Julian Castro, the former Housing secretary also from Texas.
Trump has spoken of migrant “invasions” of the United States, but also has repudiated the racism behind the El Paso killing and other massacres.
Blaming Trump for an increase in white supremacist violence has been a feature of virtually every Democratic debate.
Although some 20 or so candidates remain in the race, 10 made the cut for the Houston debate based on their fundraising and polling. The others were former Vice President Joe Biden, Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, businessman Andrew Yang and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Much of the debate, which was broadcast on ABC, focused on health care and trade policy. Foreign policy barely came up, although Booker faulted Trump for abandoning the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in depicting Trump as mercurial. (Booker, speaking on ABC following the debate, took issue with critics who faulted candidates for occasionally speaking Spanish. “Thank God, Baruch Hashem, that we’re doing multilingual tonight,” said Booker, who is familiar with Jewish texts.)
In their summaries, the candidates were asked to describe overcoming moments of resilience. Sanders, who is Jewish, recalled “growing up in a rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, New York, the son of an immigrant who came to this country without a nickel in his pocket.”
The debate’s most dramatic moment was when Castro, 44, mocked Biden, 76, for what Castro said was a memory lapse. Other candidates on the stage rebuked Castro.
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