Ivanka Trump is under fire after tweeting about Chicago’s deadliest weekend, which left seven people dead and 55 injured due to gun violence.
Trump, in keeping with her family’s commitment to alternative facts, got all the details wrong and has been accused of being “misleading” in her tweets, the Huffington Post reports.
“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,” Trump tweeted.
Trump made it sound as if there had been one shooting near a playground that resulted in the violence. HuffPo points out that while there was one shooting near a playground that left seven injured, there were thankfully no fatalities.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot took issue with Trump’s depiction slamming it as “nonsense.”
“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, according to the Chicago Tribune. “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.”
“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,” the mayor, whom the Tribune described as “livid,” added.
Lightfoot said that her focus remains actually helping to run the city and keep the city safe, rather than be “distracted by nonsense tweets from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson also challenged Ivanka Trump’s tweet. Johnson noted that, “She’s conflating the whole weekend’s activity into one incident.”
A spokesperson for Trump responded Tuesday in a statement saying: “To the extent that her quote was misleading in implying that all of the shooting incidents occurred in one location, it remains important to note that there were 7 deaths and 52 wounded across the city, resulting in one of the deadliest weekends in the city this year. Her point remains the same, we cannot ignore the gun violence that happens in cities across this country on a daily basis.”