Waters’ ‘harass’ call generates blowback
Congresswoman urges anti-Trump activity by public.
Rep. Maxine Waters, a Democrat who has represented various Southern California districts in Congress since 1991, leaned into her more recent role as a leader of the anti-Trump resistance over the weekend, earning widespread condemnation as she called for the public to “absolutely harass” President Donald Trump’s Cabinet officials on the streets, lest they help their boss turn the presidency into a dictatorship.
“The American people have put up with this president long enough. What more do we need to see? What more lies do we need to hear?” Waters shouted at a rally in Los Angeles on Saturday. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them!”
Her comments came a day after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant. Sanders’ aborted dinner party followed spontaneous street protests against other Trump aides and allies, including Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who left a Mexican restaurant to cries of “Shame!” last week.
The flash mobs are inspired, in particular, by the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy on undocumented migrants, whom Trump said should be stripped of their due-process rights.
But Waters’s indignation encompasses the entire Trump presidency — not just what he’s done, but who she says he is.
“He loves the strongmen and the dictators of the world because he wants to be just like them. He wants to run the country like them,” the congresswoman told MSNBC on Sunday, a day after her rally.