Chicago mayor calls out Ivanka Trump's 'nonsense tweets' about her city

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has had enough of Ivanka Trump’s “nonsense tweets.”

President Trump’s eldest daughter attempted on Tuesday to bring gun violence in Chicago into a broader social media conversation on the mass shootings last weekend in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, that killed at least 31 people.

In a pair of tweets, she highlighted the gun deaths that transpired on the very same weekend in Chicago, a city whose violence her father has often targeted in campaign speeches.

Lightfoot, who was inaugurated in May as Chicago’s first female African-American mayor, called out the factual inaccuracies of the presidential adviser’s tweets.

“It wasn’t a playground, it was a park. It wasn’t seven dead. It wasn’t 52 wounded in one incident, which is what this suggests. It’s misleading,” Lightfoot said at a news conference on Tuesday. “It’s important when we’re talking about people’s lives to actually get the facts correct, which one can easily do if you actually cared about getting it right.”

In fact, while seven of the 55 people shot in Chicago over the weekend died, those numbers reflected the total number of gun deaths and injuries across the entire city, not a single episode.

“That’s the danger of somebody with a platform and audience ... that doesn’t know what they’re talking about and getting the fundamental facts wrong that they can easily figure out if they had the decency to actually reach out to us if they wanted to be a constructive and engaged partner.”

Overall, while gun violence continues to plague Chicago, shootings and homicides have decreased in 2019, the Chicago Tribune reported. Still, 1,600 people in Chicago have been shot this year, and police have reported 300 homicides.

In response to the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Lightfoot sharply criticized the president, saying Monday that he had been “blowing every racist, xenophobic dog whistle.” Asked Tuesday whether her remarks may have inspired Ivanka Trump to tweet about Chicago, the mayor said she couldn’t be sure.

“What I’m focused on is actually helping run the city of Chicago and working hard every day with the superintendent and his leadership team to keep people in our city safe. I’m not going to be distracted by nonsense tweets from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”

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