President Trump tweeted a video on Wednesday with the following commentary: “It is outrageous what the Democrats are doing to our country. Vote Republican now! http://Vote.GOP.”
The incendiary video, which Trump blamed Democrats for undocumented immigrants, shows Luis Bracamontes bragging in a California courtroom about killing police officers and says Democrats want to allow more people like him into the country. Bracamonte had been previously deported to Mexico but had returned to the United States.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez appeared on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time” with Chris Cuomo and he shared his harsh, yet justified, criticisms of the President’s ad.
“This is distracting, divisive Donald at his worst,” Perez said.
“This is fear mongering. They’re hemorrhaging, Chris, on the health care issue. Health care is the number one issue in this country. They can’t talk about those (issues) because they’re on the wrong side.”
He continued, “His dog whistle of all dog whistles is immigration. This has been Donald Trump’s playbook for so long.”
Perez noted that illegal southern border crossings have been at “their lowest levels since the 1970s.”
The DNC chairman suggested the solution to the immigration crisis would be to work with the leaders of the migrants’ home countries and create relationships with those administrations. He also criticized Trump’s hate speech against Latinos as an attempt to undermine any constructive policymaking to help the immigrants.
“The way you solve this problem is by building relationships with countries in the region. But when you demonize Latinos every day, you make it harder to solve these problems,” Perez said. “That’s why you see failures in immigration policy under this administration, because nobody wants to work with our country because you’re constantly calling Mexicans ‘thugs’ and all these other atrocious names. That’s why they can’t do it.”
