Data Staff Edited Report
President Trump on Monday lashed out at Rep. Maxine Waters after the California Democrat urged protesters to publicly confront members of his administration over its controversial policies.
“Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party,” Trump tweeted on Monday afternoon. “She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!”
At a rally against Trump’s immigration policy in Los Angeles on Saturday, Waters did not, in fact, call for Trump supporters, but she did tell demonstrators to continue the public confrontations.
“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,” Waters said. “And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Waters did not immediately return a request for a response to the president’s tweet.
Her comments came a day after White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was asked to leave a small restaurant in rural Virginia after its staffers told the owner they were uncomfortable with her being there.
Sanders was at least the third Trump administration official to be confronted while dining in public in a six-day span. Homeland Security Security Kirstjen Nielsen and White House adviser Stephen Miller were each heckled while eating at different Washington, D.C., Mexican restaurants earlier in the week.
Pelosi, the House minority leader, distanced herself from Waters on Monday morning.
“In the crucial months ahead, we must strive to make America beautiful again. Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable,” she wrote in a tweet that included a link to a story about Waters’s remarks. “As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea.”
It’s not the first time Trump has sparred with Waters. At a rally in Pennsylvania in March, Trump called on Republicans to defeat both Pelosi and Waters, whom he labeled a “very low IQ individual.”
Waters, one of the president’s most outspoken critics on Capitol Hill, had called for Trump to be impeached.
“Everybody knows who this bully is,” Waters said on MSNBC in response to Trump’s disparaging comments. “This is what we expect of him. I just wonder what took him so long.”
She added: “I am not intimidated by him.”
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) appeared on MSNBC Monday night to clarify that she did not call for physical harm or attacks on Trump officials amid widespread backlash to the President’s zero-tolerance policy on illegal immigration.
“I did not call for harm for anybody, the President lied again,” Waters told Chris Hayes on MSNBC. “As a matter of fact I believe in peaceful protest.”
She added: “I believe that protest is at the centerpiece of our democracy. I believe that the constitution guarantees us freedom of speech. And I think that protest is civil. I don’t know why the President chose to stretch that out and try to imply that I was causing harm. As a matter of fact the President calls for more violence than anybody else.”
Waters has faced a wave of criticism, including from President Trump, since urging her supporters to confront Trump staffers in public for the administration’s zero-tolerance policy that has led to over 2,300 migrant children being separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border.
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