Katie Glueck and Matt Stevens

It was a rare day when the candidates were largely in unison in their message, as they raised alarms about the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Only last week the candidates were criticizing each other over policy differences during their televised debates; Monday, the Democrats were all but acting in concert as they sought to hold Trump accountable for his past remarks on white supremacy and attacks on people of color.

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas and Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, who hail from the states where two gunmen killed 31 people this weekend, began Monday by strongly condemning Republican inaction on passing gun control measures. Their sentiments were echoed by several of their 2020 rivals at a gathering of the civil rights group, UnidosUS, held in San Diego.

“Mr. President, it’s long past time you addressed it for what it is: This is hatred, pure and simple,” said former Vice President Joe Biden as he railed against white supremacy and the most divisive actions of the Trump administration. “And it’s being fueled by rhetoric that is so divisive, and it’s causing, causing people to die.”

Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who gave one of the most well-received speeches of the gathering, appeared to tweak Trump for saying that several members of Congress who are women of color should “go back” to the countries they came from, though most of them were born in the United States.

“We are going to help him get out of the White House and go back to his reality television show or wherever he came from,” she said to loud and sustained applause. As she wrapped up her speech, she ramped up her rhetoric, calling Trump “clearly a racist.”

And Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who rarely focuses on his biography in his political speeches, wrote on Twitter about his family’s losses in the Holocaust and the dangers facing Americans today.

“Most of my father’s family was brutally murdered at the hands of Hitler’s white supremacist regime — a regime which came to power on a wave of violence and hatred against racial and religious minorities,” he wrote. “We cannot allow that cancer to grow here.”

After weeks of open conflict between the Democratic presidential candidates, they largely dialed back their direct and implicit criticisms of each other. Most of the candidates have ripped into Trump on a daily basis in recent months, but they used some of their most pungent language Monday. They seized on the president’s early-morning suggestion to tie background checks on gun purchasers to immigration legislation, his later comments that did not include major new gun control measures, and most of all his history of harsh remarks on race and immigration.

Speaking with CNN from Dayton, where one of the shootings killed nine people, Ryan also demanded that Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, “do something.”

“People are getting killed in the streets in America, and nobody is acting,” Ryan said.

O’Rourke, who is from El Paso, where the other shooting killed 22 people, continued to focus on a question he had been asked late Sunday about whether there was anything Trump could do to make things better in the wake of the shootings.

In an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” he said that the president had exhibited “open racism” — an “invitation to violence.”

“Anyone who is surprised” by the violence, O’Rourke said, “is part of this problem right now — including members of the media who ask, ‘Hey Beto, do you think the president is racist?’

“Well, Jesus Christ, of course he’s racist,” he said. “He’s been racist from Day 1.”

These candidates were among many Democratic primary contenders who expressed continued outrage about the shootings and the strains of white nationalism some said emanate from the White House. Authorities in Texas have said the El Paso shooter wrote a manifesto posted online that railed against immigrants and that said the attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

“The attack two days ago was an attack on the Latino community,” said Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and the only Latino candidate in the race, who received a warm welcome at UnidosUS. “It was an attack on immigrants. It was an attack on Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and that is no accident. That is due in part to the climate that this president has set, of division. Of otherness.”

On Monday morning, Trump said on Twitter that “We cannot let those killed in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, die in vain” and called on Republicans and Democrats to come together to pass background checks, potentially combined with immigration reform legislation — a stipulation that would make Democrats likely to oppose it.

In additional comments later Monday, Trump condemned white supremacy but did not repeat his call for background checks. Instead, he called for stronger action to address mental illness and argued that the internet can “radicalize disturbed minds.”

“Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger,” he said, “not the gun.”

That contention, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was Trump’s attempt “to avoid truth.”

“There’s mental illness &amp; hate throughout world, but U.S. stands alone w/high rate of gun violence,” Klobuchar said on Twitter. “When someone can kill 9 people in a minute, that gun should never have been sold.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts also took issue with Trump’s framing of the situation.

“White supremacy is not a mental illness,” she said Monday afternoon. “We need to call it what it is: Domestic terrorism. And we need to call out Donald Trump for amplifying these deadly ideologies.”

In San Diego, fury with Trump was palpable as activists convened at a sprawling convention center. Janet Murguía, the group’s president and CEO, called on Trump to “rebuke,” “condemn” and “apologize for this climate that he has created,” drawing a direct link between his rhetoric and the shooting in El Paso.

Officials with the organization walked reporters through a poll of 1,854 eligible Latino voters, conducted in June. Of them, 78% said they were frustrated with how Trump and his allies treated immigrants and Latinos and that they were worried those dynamics would get worse. Officials said they also saw that combating gun control was rising in importance for Latino voters.

Yvette Bello, a conference attendee from Hartford, Connecticut, said Trump had been “inciting” violence.

“He’s the leader of hate speech,” said Bello, 41, who is considering supporting Sanders and Klobuchar in the Democratic primary. Of Trump, she continued, “he racialized politics from the very beginning of his campaign.”

Not everyone at the conference who criticized Trump’s rhetoric was an enthusiastic Democratic voter.

David Zumaya, a board member of the San Diego County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said he was independent-minded, and that former President George H.W. Bush was the last president he was “crazy about.” But Zumaya, who said he had supported neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent in 2016, suggested that to support the president now would be difficult and a “disgrace to my ethnicity, because of his attacks toward Latinos.”

Earlier Monday, Warren and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York were among the candidates who called on McConnell to bring lawmakers back into session to vote on gun safety measures, and in her speech at UnidosUS, Klobuchar hit that theme, too, urging Washington to act. In a CNN interview, Gillibrand called Trump’s suggestion that gun measures be tied to immigration reform “absurd.”

“He’s linking the issue of basic, common-sense gun reform, that we should be going back into the Senate today to vote on, with this issue of immigration because, again, he continues to try to demonize people seeking asylum,” she said.

By Monday afternoon, one more high-profile Democrat had weighed in.

“No other nation on Earth comes close to experiencing the frequency of mass shootings that we see in the United States,” former President Barack Obama said in a statement posted to Twitter. He called on the public to push for tougher gun laws and urged law enforcement and internet companies to work to reduce the influence of groups that espouse hate.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/us/politics/trump-shootings-2020-democrats.html" id="8320ed30-1b16-3314-a5e4-c9e0b24b7e1e">The New York Times</a>.

'Of Course He's Racist': Candidates Criticize Trump After Shootings

SAN DIEGO — From cable news interviews early Monday morning to speeches before a Latino civil rights group later in the day, Democratic candidates for president mounted one of their most brutal offensives of the 2020 campaign against President Donald Trump, excoriating him over rampant gun violence in America and a racist and divisive culture they accuse him of fostering.

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Katie Glueck and Matt Stevens

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'Of Course He's Racist': Candidates Criticize Trump After Shootings