President Donald Trump on Monday mocked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for shedding tears over the plight of refugees.
“I don’t see him as a crier,” Trump said of Schumer, and asked whether the senator had hired an “acting coach.”
“There’s about a 5 percent chance that it was real, but I think they were fake tears,” he said ahead of a meeting with small business leaders at the White House.
Standing alongside several refugees in New York City on Sunday, Schumer vowed to fight Trump’s executive order that temporarily blocked the entry of all refugees, indefinitely blocked Syrian refugees and imposed a ban on travelers coming from several Muslim-majority countries.
“This order was mean-spirited and un-American,” the senator said as he fought back tears.
“The president wants people to believe that everyone’s a terrorist or a criminal who’s an immigrant. It’s not fair and it’s not right,” he added.
A spokesman for the New York senator declined to take the bait.
“We are not going to dignify that with a response,” Matt House, communications director for Schumer, told HuffPost.
Trump has hurled personal insults at Schumer before. Earlier this month, the president referred to the senator as “head clown” amid the fight to repeal Obamacare.
In an interview with HuffPost’s Amanda Terkel, Schumer said he believed it was a mistake to go toe-to-toe with Trump in a similar fashion.
“I think you stick with your values and the merits,” he said, “because I think that you go down to his level [with name-calling]. He loves that level of just name-calling. And then the focus is off the bad things he’s doing to America.”
This article has been updated with comment from Schumer’s office.