Ivanka Trump took a leaf out of her father’s book on Tuesday, firing off a tweet without seeming to first perform a quick check of her basic facts.
After Chicago’s deadliest weekend of the year ― which left seven people dead and 55 injured from gunshots ― Trump told her 6.8 million Twitter followers:
While there was, in fact, one shooting near a playground in Douglas Park, there were no fatalities and seven people were wounded.
The weekend of violence left Chicago police, emergency responders and hospitals strained, with one West Side hospital forced to put its trauma center on “bypass” Saturday night after an overwhelming influx of shooting victims.
According to Chicago Tribune, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was “livid” about Trump’s error-filled tweet.
“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. “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.”
Lightfoot said her focus was to protect and run the city, and she wouldn’t allow herself to be distracted by “nonsense tweets from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson also made a statement correcting Trump’s tweet.
“That’s not what happened,” Johnson said. “She’s conflating the whole weekend’s activity into one incident.”
A spokeswoman for Ivanka Trump issued a statement on Tuesday and admitted the numbers in the tweet were “misleading,” but stood by the overall message.
“Her point remains the same, we cannot ignore the gun violence that happens in cities across this country on a daily basis,” the spokeswoman said.
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