O’Rourke urges ‘make a stand here’
Near face-off with Trump pushes El Paso Democrat into the national spotlight
EL PASO — President Donald Trump campaigned in Beto O’Rourke’s hometown on Monday, taunting the Democrat about the size of his crowd as they headlined dueling rallies separated by just a few hundred yards of parking lot and a chain link fence.
It was a one-day preview of sorts for Trump versus O’Rourke, who has not said whether he will run for president in 2020 after two months of pondering it. But in a border wall showdown in the far most western corner of Texas, O’Rourke and Trump sounded like rivals going after each other.
Moments before Trump took the stage at the El Paso County Coliseum, O’Rourke launched a spirited defense of El Paso in a nearby recreation center baseball field, accusing the president of misrepresenting both the city and the impact of more than
40 miles of fencing that separates it from Juarez in Mexico.
“All of us together are going to make a stand here, in one of the the safest cities in the United States of America, not because of walls, but in spite of walls.” O’Rourke said. “This is where we make our stand.”
Trump again cited El Paso as evidence that erecting barriers along the U.S.Mexico border works, saying the fencing built there in 2009 has made the city safer.
And the president said inaccurately that O’Rourke’s crowd outside — which was clearly in the thousands — was a few hundred people, referring to him as “a young man who’s got very little going for himself, but he’s got a great first name. We have, say, 35,000 people tonight?
“I say that may be the end of his presidential bid.”
Speaking of barriers, there was a line of law enforcement officers who formed a human wall between the two rallies.
Political experts say O’Rourke has much to gain from Monday’s almost-faceoff.
“What a gift Trump is giving Beto,” said Mark McKinnon, a former chief media adviser to five presidential campaigns and a Texas resident. “I think this whole experience is going to re-animate O’Rourke and remind him why he should be in the spotlight.”
After an 18-month campaign for the U.S. Senate that had him covering up to 250 miles a day as he crisscrossed Texas in his minivan, polls suggest O’Rourke’s popularity has slid as other Democrats have launched campaigns for the White House.
O’Rourke complained in his blog about being in a “funk” and critics questioned if he had lost the surge that helped him raise $80 million in campaign contributions, coming within three percentage points of one of the biggest political upsets in Texas history.
Then came Trump. When the president announced he would hold a rally in El Paso, he was targeting the city and even the neighborhood where O’Rourke’s family lives.
Trump and O’Rourke are far from strangers. They’ve exchanged glancing blows over the past year. In October, Trump took to Twitter to call O’Rourke a lightweight and then followed up by declaring O’Rourke a “stone-cold phony” at a rally to defend Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in Houston.
O’Rourke, meanwhile, led some of the first protests at Tornillo, the camp where children of asylum seekers and migrants were being separated from their parents by the Trump administration, an issue that became a major topic as Democrats regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.
In some ways, Trump may help to refocus O’Rourke, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor. Just as O’Rourke appeared to be trying to re-establish himself in the Democratic universe, Trump has given him a chance for the closest thing to face-to-face debate that he’s had, Rottinghaus said.
For O’Rourke, it could be a big week on the national stage. By the end of the week, O’Rourke will be before millions of viewers again as an interview he had with Oprah Winfrey airs Feb. 16.
None of it means Trump is walking into some sort of trap.
“It’s clear this is what Trump wants to fight over in 2020,” Rottinghaus said.
Hours before his rally, Trump said he would pull a much bigger crowd than O’Rourke.
“We have a line that is very long already,” Trump said. “I mean, you see what’s going on. And I understand our competition’s got a line too, but it’s a tiny little line.”
The Republican National Committee chimed in too, distributing research purporting to show that barriers around El Paso significantly reduced human and drug trafficking. “Beto doesn’t even know his own back yard,” the RNC said, underscoring his possible 2020 presidential bid.
El Paso community leaders fired back.
“We will not let this president use us to advance a racist, hateful, destructive agenda,” said Fernando Garcia, of the Border Network for Human Rights. “We must call out his lies and refuse to spend billions on a wall or any new enforcement that will do nothing to solve our most pressing issues at hand.”
FBI data show that violent crimes in El Paso, a city of almost 700,000 people, have plunged since the 1990s, long before the wall was built in 2009. The number of murders peaked at 56 in 1993 and typically have been at 20 a year or below since 2000.
Texas already has about 112 miles of border fencing, including the El Paso barriers. While Trump campaigned on building a wall along all 2,000 miles of the U.S. border — including 1,200 miles in Texas — his most ardent supporters in Texas say the key is to erect barriers from Brownsville to Falcon Lake, a stretch of about 160 miles where many areas still don’t have walls or fences.
Trump’s visit to Texas was his eighth visit to the state since he was elected. Just a month ago, he was in McAllen also calling for the border wall. He’s now visited Texas twice as many times as former President Barack Obama did in his first term in office. And Trump still has almost two more years before his first term ends.
The two rallies were billed as a battle over border walls and immigration policies, but for many, the near-head-to-head encounter between the biggest force in Republican politics and one of the newest faces of the Democratic Party was the draw.
“For at least one day, this put Beto on Trump’s level. Mano a mano with the president,” McKinnon said.