O'Rourke: We will 'die in our sleep' if we don't confront Trump threat

Beto O’Rourke, blaming Donald Trump for acts of racism and violence spreading across the country, restarted his presidential campaign on Thursday as a singular, impassioned crusade to defeat the Republican president.

“I’m confident that if at this moment, we do not wake up to this threat," he said in an early morning address in El Paso, "then we as a country will die in our sleep.”

O’Rourke, who had paused his campaign and returned home to El Paso, Texas, following the mass shooting at a Walmart there, called for a controversial, mandatory buyback of assault weapons. And he told supporters in the city that he will resume campaigning with a focus not on early primary states, but in communities where he said Trump’s policies have been felt most acutely.

Rejecting the “corn dogs and Ferris wheels” of the Iowa State Fair, which he skipped over the weekend, O’Rourke told supporters, “I can’t go back for that, but I also cannot go back to that.”

“To those places where Donald Trump has been terrorizing and terrifying and demeaning our fellow Americans,” he said, “that’s where you will find me and this campaign.”

O’Rourke plans to visit Mississippi on Friday, drawing attention to the Trump administration’s recent immigration raids in the state. He will speak at an Arkansas Democratic Party dinner in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Saturday.

O’Rourke, speaking uncharacteristically from a lectern to a small crowd on a ridge overlooking El Paso’s shared skyline with Juárez, Mexico, explicitly rejected calls by some Democrats for him to abandon his presidential campaign and run for Senate instead.

With the sounds of the El Paso High School band practicing rising in the background, O’Rourke said of a Senate bid, “That would not be good enough for this community. That would not be good enough for El Paso. That would not be good enough for this country.”

“We must take the fight directly to the source of this problem, that person who has caused this pain and placed this country in this moment of peril,” O’Rourke said. “And that is Donald Trump.”

“You do not get kids in cages until you’ve given people permission to put them in cages by calling them ‘animals’ and seeking to dehumanize them,” he said. “You don’t lose the lives of seven children in the custody and care of the wealthiest, the most powerful country on the face of the planet, unless you have made it possible. And you do not get somebody driving 600 miles to come to this community — in his manifesto repeating the very words used by the president of the United States to justify this act of terror and hatred and violence and death.”

The speech was O’Rourke’s first since suspending his campaign travel following the shooting that left 22 people dead in the city. He missed scheduled campaign stops in Nevada, California and in Iowa, where most Democratic candidates traveled this past weekend for the Iowa State Fair.

In his return to the campaign, O’Rourke will hardly be a singular voice in his criticism of Trump. The candidates running ahead of him in the Democratic primary have all cast the Republican president as an immediate danger. O’Rourke has seen his fundraising fall off since entering the race, and he is lagging in public opinion polls. The latest Morning Consult survey, on Tuesday, put O’Rourke at 3 percent nationally. An Economist/YouGov poll released Wednesday put him at 5 percent.

In his return to the campaign, O’Rourke indicted not only Trump, but an "impotent" political system he said has failed to protect Americans from the scourge of gun violence.

“We have a Congress too craven to act, a democracy not up to the task, that favors those who can pay for access and influence and outcomes," he said, "the complicity and the silence of those who are in positions of public trust.”

In addition to universal background checks, red-flag laws and a ban on the sale of assault weapons and "weapons of war," O’Rourke called for a mandatory buyback program, saying, "we must, as a country, buy those weapons, take them off the streets altogether."

The restart represents an effort by O’Rourke, as he has before, to place his border city — and its immigrant experience — at the center of the presidential campaign.

Even before he announced his candidacy, he had rallied there against Trump’s immigration policies, and after the Walmart shooting, O’Rourke said he hoped that El Paso, in its response, had provided “an example to the rest of the country about who we can become as America.”

“This connection that we have with Ciudad Juárez is one of the most beautiful that you will find between two cities from two countries anywhere in the world,” he said, “joined, not separated by the Rio Grande river, forming something far greater and more powerful than the sum of their parts.”