Trump’s response to protests met with ridicule

Wasserman Schultz: President ‘tucks his tail between his legs, hides’

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz tore into President Donald Trump on Monday for what she described as his hapless response to the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd.

“Where is the president? Where is the president of the United States using the platform that he has to heal the country and bring us together?” she asked during a video news conference.

Trump should have addressed the nation to “acknowledge the hurt and the hundreds of years of racial injustice and pain that exists. But instead, he tucks his tail between his legs, hides in a bunker and allows Rome to burn around him,” Wasserman Schultz said.

News accounts from Washington reported that Secret Service agents put Trump in the White House bunker on Friday night as protesters massed outside the White House.

Trump is a frequent target for Wasserman Schultz, a former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, who represents Broward and Miami-Dade counties in the U.S. House.

Wasserman Schultz said Trump’s response to the protests — mostly confined to comments on Twitter — is “outrageous and unacceptable.”

The comments came during an online news conference in which Wasserman Schultz and other South Florida Democrats called on the U.S. Senate to pass additional funding for programs to deal with the coronavirus pandemic and its economic impact.

The pandemic has been eclipsed in recent days by the reaction to a white Minneapolis police officer’s killing of Floyd by pressing his knee into the black victim’s neck until he was dead.

Protests across the nation that have been largely peaceful, but turning violent at nightfall, spread this weekend to Fort Lauderdale, Miami and West Palm Beach.

U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, a Palm Beach County Democrat, said she was sad and angry after seeing “another unlawful act of police brutality. This time it was caught on video in Minnesota that reflects the sad reality of racial injustice in our country.”

Frankel said the peaceful protests and respectful interactions between participants “should not be overshadowed by a night of vandalism by a small group of people whose actions were counterproductive and wrong.”

U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, a Democrat who represents parts of Broward and Palm Beach counties, said he wanted to offer “condolences to George Floyd’s family and to the countless families of black men and women who have been unfairly targeted and murdered, racially profiled, all because systemic racism that has plagued too much of our criminal

justice system and too much of our country for so long.”

Wasserman Schultz said the time since Floyd’s killing on May 25 has been “a stark reminder that we cannot continue to ignore racial injustice. And ignoring racial injustice is what has happened.”

“Minneapolis was not an isolated incident. George Floyd’s horrific death just happened to be caught on camera. And before that we knew that systemic racism was at work as COVID-19 took harsher tolls on African American communities, disproportionately impacting people of color,” Wasserman Schultz said.

Deutch said people concerned about what happened

to Floyd and many others need to vote. “Voting is the most powerful tool to create change,” he said.

“Minneapolis was not an isolated incident. George Floyd’s horrific death just happened to be caught on camera.”

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, U.S. congresswoman

Wasserman Schultz