Sherrod Brown asks Trump to stop media attacks after BBC cameraman shoved

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who is seriously considering a 2020 presidential bid, on Tuesday called on President Trump to rein in his supporters’ attacks on the media, warning of a tragedy happening “sometime in the future.”

Brown made his comments after a BBC cameraman was shoved and cursed at during a Trump border rally in El Paso, Texas, on Monday evening.

{mosads}“He should call off his supporters who are doing those kind of things,” Brown said at a breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. “Call them out and ask them to stop. We all are concerned there will be something worse happening at some time in the future.”

Footage from the El Paso rally showed a man wearing a red Make America Great Again hat accosting BBC cameraman Ron Skeans.

“It’s important to call on the president to stop the encouraging of violence at these rallies,” Brown said. 

Gary O’Donoghue, BBC’s Washington correspondent, who was present at the rally, described the incident later on BBC radio as an “incredibly violent attack.” 

Brown said physical attacks on the media by Trump supporters have “become too par for the course.”

“I talk about this at home a lot with my wife about what’s happening in this country,” he said. “It’s important that the president at some point, sooner rather than later, goes on television — not just tweets but goes on television — and says that reporters and journalists are not enemies of the people,” he said. 

Brown noted that during many of his Senate campaign rallies in Ohio he has thanked journalists for their work.

He recalled telling a crowd at a rally at Parma, Ohio, that “journalists play an important role and are not enemies of the people and the group as a whole, these people at a Democratic rally, turned around and gave a standing ovation to the journalists.”

He added it “was something you would never see at a Republican rally, a Trump rally.”

Brown, who is married to Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning longtime columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been mulling a 2020 run for the White House.

Shultz said in January that her husband would make a decision “within the next two months.”