Karen Bass: Trump ‘creating warfare within cities’

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass clapped back on Wednesday at President Trump’s suggestion to use the military in American cities as “training grounds,” and the president is “creating warfare within” these cities.

In an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, Bass talked about the president’s remarks at a large gathering of the nation’s top generals and admirals in Quantico, Va.

“The statements that were made to the military yesterday, acknowledging that we are going to experiment with our cities and use our cities as training grounds for warfare, what that is saying is that the president of the United States wants to turn the U.S. military against the American people,” Bass said.

Bass defended Los Angeles’s crime reduction and added that “there is more work to do.”

“So instead of using us as a test ground for the military, they choose to cut programs that actually help to lower the violence and crime rate,” she said.

“You are talking about creating warfare within cities, and again, I will point out, there’s something these cities have in common,” Bass said.

During the gathering on Tuesday, Trump remarked that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military — National Guard, but our military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon.”

Trump also claimed that a federal crackdown in Democratic-led cities was needed due to “a war from within.”

In June, Trump deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles following protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests south of the city. In a June 8 statement, Bass called the deployment “a chaotic escalation.”

Three months later, a federal judge ruled that the use of the National Guard in Los Angeles was unlawful.

“The White House tried to invade the second largest city in the country,” Bass said in a Sept. 8 statement. “That was illegal. Los Angeles will not buckle and we will not break. We will not be divided and we will not be defeated.”