Congresswoman Maxine Waters spoke out against Trump’s continued attacks on her and fellow lawmakers this week, saying his vitriol is “setting some of us up to be killed.”
Waters, one of Donald Trump‘s most vocal critics who made early calls for his impeachment, has found herself on the receiving end of the president’s rants in the past.
Rep. Maxine Waters argued Wednesday that Donald Trump’s attacks on lawmakers and others are putting people’s lives in danger. (Photo: MSNBC / video screenshot)
“I have death threats constantly,” the California Democrat told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on Wednesday, adding: “There are a number of people who’ve been convicted for threatening to kill me. And when [Trump] does that, he’s dog-whistling to the white supremacists, the [Ku Klux Klan] and the dangerous people.”
In May, a Syracuse man was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison after threatening to kill Waters and members of her staff — an effort meant to “terrorize” the lawmaker for her public criticism of Trump.
Now Waters says she can’t even “go to the grocery store anymore by myself” and that she’s had to “pay for security all the time.”
“This president is so irresponsible in so many ways,” she opined.
More recently, Trump, 73, has turned his attacks toward an anonymous whistleblower who filed a complaint accusing the president of abusing his power after urging the president of Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden and his son. The damning complaint is now the crux of House Democrats’ formal impeachment inquiry against him.
The president blasted the whistleblower as “almost a spy” who should be punished like a traitor and has even demanded to “interview & learn everything about the whistleblower,” despite laws protecting those individuals’ identities from being revealed.
“He should not be talking about wanting to interview them,” Waters said of Trump. “If he knew anything about law, he wouldn’t be so ignorant as to think that somehow anybody’s going to allow him to interview a whistleblower.”
“He shouldn’t be going after anybody,” she continued. “He’s the president of the United States of America.”
Watch more in the video clip below.
.@RepMaxineWaters on Trump threatening the whistleblower: "He is setting some of us up to be killed. I have death threats constantly. There are a number of people who have been convicted for threatening to kill me." pic.twitter.com/0uJVhPTiaK
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 2, 2019
