Ivanka Trump's attempt to highlight gun violence in Chicago backfired when the city's mayor slammed her misleading tweets as 'nonsense'
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
Ivanka Trump's efforts to spotlight gun violence in Chicago spectacularly backfired when the city's mayor slammed her tweets on the matter as "nonsense" and said Trump didn't have her facts straight.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the tweets mischaracterized the location where a shooting took place, got some of the numbers wrong, and misleadingly suggested all of those wounded across the city were shot in a single incident. "It's important when we're talking about people's lives to actually get the facts correct," she said.
Lightfoot said she was "not going to be distracted by nonsense tweets from people who don't know what they're talking about."
Ivanka Trump's efforts to spotlight gun violence in Chicago spectacularly backfired when the city's mayor slammed her tweets on the matter as "nonsense" and said Trump didn't have her facts straight.
Following the widely covered mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, that together killed 31 people and injured dozens of others over the weekend, Trump sought to draw attention to gun violence in Chicago.
"As we grieve over the evil mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, let us not overlook that Chicago experienced its deadliest weekend of the year," Trump wrote. "With 7 dead and 52 wounded near a playground in the Windy City- and little national outrage or media coverage- we mustn't become numb to the violence faced by inner-city communities every day."
But Mayor Lori Lightfoot was none too happy with Trump's portrayal of gun violence in Chicago, excoriating her tweets as inaccurate and uninformed at a Tuesday meeting with the Chicago police, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Lightfoot said Trump didn't get the basic facts of the shootings correct, saying: "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. 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."
Trump's tweets received more than 4,000 retweets and 19,000 likes.
"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," Lightfoot said.
Lightfoot added that she was going to focus on working with law enforcement and community members and was "not going to be distracted by nonsense tweets from people who don't know what they're talking about."
According to a Tribune tracker of violence in the city, 293 people have died by homicide this year through July, with most of those cases resulting from shootings. The Tribune said it had counted 55 people shot, seven fatally, in Chicago over the weekend.
Trump's father, President Donald Trump, is expected to visit both Dayton and El Paso on Wednesday.
