A handful of Democrats ardently critical of President Donald Trump head to the White House on Wednesday as part of more than 100 of the nation’s top mayors gathering to discuss a handful of issues.
The “working session” between Trump and the mayors will put city leaders like New Orleans’ Mitch Landrieu, New York’s Bill de Blasio and Columbia, South Carolina’s Stephen Benjamin in the same room with a man whom many of the mayors have used as a rhetorical foil for months, setting up the possibility for contentious exchanges.
The meetings will focus on “the growing economy, as well as working together to tackle the opioid epidemic and rebuild the nation’s aging infrastructure,” according to White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters.
Landrieu, whose term in New Orleans ends later this year, has been an outspoken critic of Trump, particularly on the way that he describes cities and his comments about Confederate monuments. Landrieu is among the Democrats rumored to be eying a presidential run in 2020.
The frequent criticism of Trump from mayors — including Landrieu — focus on the President’s efforts to disparage American cities.
“Our cities are a source of American pride,” Landrieu, who endorsed Hillary Clinton, wrote in an October 2016 post. “A candidate for President cannot make America prosperous if he doesn’t understand that America’s cities are, in fact, the backbone of the national economy.”
Landrieu, who has also knocked Trump for his immigration policies, gained national attention in 2017 when he delivered an impassioned speech calling for New Orleans’ Confederate monuments to be taken down.
“These statues are not just stone and metal,” Landrieu said during the May 2017 speech. “They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement and the terror that it actually stood for.”
The speech put Landrieu directly at odds with Trump, who has slammed efforts to remove Confederate statues and tweeted last year that it was “sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”
Benjamin, too, has been an outspoken critic. He blasted Trump’s “incredibly bad” decision to leave the Paris climate agreement in 2017 and suggested that Trump shouldn’t be in office after he infamously said there was blame on “both sides” in the deadly Charlottesville protests over Confederate monuments.
“We are greater than the sum total of our parts,” Benjamin had said. “And we need a leader that’s going to speak to that. If he can’t do that, then he ought not to be President of the United States of America.”
New York’s de Blasio, who counts Trump as a constituent, has said that Trump’s travel ban orders are “simply un-American” and said that the President’s tax plan — which passed late last year — was a “danger” to New York City.
These mayors, along with many others, are in Washington this week for the US Conference of Mayors Winter Session. Landrieu is the president of the conference and Benjamin is the group’s vice president.
Also notable is who didn’t make the cut for the White House event. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg will not attend, an aide to the mayor said, and neither will Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Both are seen as rising stars in the Democratic Party.
An official from the Conference of Mayors said Wednesday that the meeting at the White House was not an official group event, adding that the White House did not go through the conference to put together a list of invitees.
The newly elected Mayor of Atlanta Keisha Lance Bottoms will also attend the event, according to the White House. Trump tweeted in 2017 that the city was “in horrible shape and falling apart” and “crime infested.”
A number of mayors whose cities have been directly impacted by gun violence will also attend the event, including the mayors of Aurora, Colorado, San Bernardino, California, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Dallas, Texas.