Story highlights
Local officials in Florida and Pennsylvania fight fire with fire
The mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida, calls Trump's plan to ban Muslims 'ridiculous'
Donald Trump’s plan to temporarily halt the immigration of Muslims to the U.S. is being met with a mini-wave of mayoral backlash.
“If I had the power, the only banning that would be done is that I would ban [Trump] from Philadelphia,” said that city’s mayor, Democrat Michael Nutter, on Tuesday. “We don’t have any room for that kind of stupidity here.”
Hours earlier, another Pennsylvania mayor (and longshot Senate candidate), Braddock’s outspoken John Fetterman, released a statement calling Trump a “jagoff,” a western Pennsylvania slang expression that means stupid.
In a Monday night tweet, Rick Kriseman, the mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida, cheekily declared he would ban the GOP front-runner from entering his city “until we fully understand the dangerous threat posed by all Trumps.”
Kriseman’s riposte landed Monday night a few hours after Trump’s controversial call for “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Trump added, “Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.”
By 8 a.m. on Tuesday, Kriseman’s response had been retweeted nearly 7,500 times and received more applause than not.
“HA HA - is this sarcasm?” asked one person.
“Yeah,” the mayor responded. “Answering ridiculousness w/ridiculousness.”
“That’s obviously not something I would try to do,” Kriseman told the Tampa Bay Times later, again explaining he had no intention of formally barring Trump.
“But his statement was kind of ridiculous, so I thought that it deserved an equal response.”
