Trump: Views on MS-13, Kim show Democrats out of touch
President Donald Trump on Friday said congressional Democrats “have lost touch,” accusing the opposition party of rooting against his attempts to disarm North Korea and coddling members of the violent MS-13 gang.
The president on Thursday thanked a bipartisan group of lawmakers who helped pass a bill that eases financial regulations before he signed it at the White House. But the next morning, he tweeted that “Democrats are so obviously rooting against us in our negotiations with North Korea.”
That allegation came a day after Trump canceled his planned June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after concluding the dictator was behaving unreliably and could not be trusted to talk about a serious and verifiable deal.
Democratic lawmakers placed ample blame on the U.S. commander in chief, saying the cancellation reflected an unprepared president and an administration that mishandled the run-up to the now-scuttled summit.
For instance, House Intelligence ranking member Adam B. Schiff of California blamed the summit’s cancellation Thursday on “a poor negotiating strategy in which the president made it all too clear to North Korea that he needed the summit more than the North Korean dictator,” adding in a statement that “this put the United States in a weak bargaining position.”
Trump did react to an overnight statement from the Kim government in which it praised Trump for even being willing to hold one-onone talks. On Friday morning, he called that statement “Very good news” and “warm” and “productive.”
But the GOP president did not limit his morning criticism of the opposition party to its reaction to his summit decision.
He also accused them of “coming to the defense of MS 13 thugs.” Trump wrote that Democratic lawmakers say members of the murderous gang are “individuals & must be nurtured.”
During a White House event last week that prompted an extensive back and forth of the president’s use of the term “animals” to describe, depending on whom was interpreting, MS-13 gang members or all undocumented immigrants.
On Wednesday, Trump slammed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democrats for panning his remark and saying he was referring to all immigrants. “I called them animals the other day and I was met with rebuke,” he said during an event in New York. “They said, ‘They are people.’ They’re not people. These are animals. And we have to be very, very tough,” he said of MS-13 members.”
All indications point to the president being eager to turn Pelosi’s and Democrats’ criticism over “animals” into a campaign-trail message heading into the midterm elections in November, which will determine which party controls the House and Senate for the remainder of his current term.
Another expected campaign message was part of his Friday morning tweets, with Trump accusing Democrats with “asking to end your big Tax Cuts & raise your taxes instead. Dems have lost touch!”
Congressional Democrats counter such lines by saying the GOP tax law Trump helped push through both chambers disproportionately helps large corporations and does little to help the “forgotten men and women” — candidate Trump’s words — that helped put him in the Oval Office in 2016.
In a string of tweets fired off in close succession, the president also fixated on the ongoing Justice Department Russia election meddling and possible obstruction of justice probe. He charged Democrats with trying to obscure the matter by “alluding to the concept that having an Informant placed in an opposing party’s campaign is different than having a Spy, as illegal as that may be.”