Elizabeth Warren calls Trump a white supremacist

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told The New York Times on Wednesday that she thinks President Trump is a white supremacist, becoming the latest Democratic presidential candidate to take that view publicly.

“Yes,” Warren said, asked by the paper if she thought the characterization applied to Trump.

{mosads}“He has given aid and comfort to white supremacists. He’s done the wink and a nod,” she added during a campaign swing in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “He has talked about white supremacists as fine people. He’s done everything he can to stir up racial conflict and hatred in this country.”

“Donald Trump has a central message. He says to the American people, if there’s anything wrong in your life, blame them — and ‘them’ means people who aren’t the same color as you, weren’t born where you were born, don’t worship the same way you do,” she said.

The Democratic presidential field has stepped up its criticism of Trump as a white supremacist in the wake of a Saturday mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. Police believe the shooting was motivated by the suspect’s fear of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” as outlined in a manifesto the suspect allegedly wrote.

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), an El Paso native who has left the campaign trail to return to his hometown since the shooting, also called Trump a white supremacist on Wednesday on MSNBC and drew a direct line between his rhetoric on immigration, which has also frequently invoked an “invasion” by immigrants, and the shooting.

“He’s dehumanized or sought to dehumanize those who do not look like or pray like the majority here in this country,” O’Rourke said on MSNBC.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, said Trump has “fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation” in a speech Wednesday, while Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) this week condemned Trump’s history on race in a speech at Charleston, S.C.’s Emanuel AME Church, where white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans in 2015.

Trump publicly condemned white supremacy in the wake of the El Paso shooting, but in a Wednesday night tweet accused Democrats of making accusations of racism for political gain.