Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer, wants nothing to do with President Donald Trump.
Bro, whose daughter was killed in a car attack by a Nazi sympathizer in Charlottesville, Virginia, brought up her lack of interest in talking to Trump on Friday’s Good Morning America. Asked if she had spoken to the president, Bro said:
I have not, and now I will not. At first I just missed his calls. The first call looked like it actually came during the funeral. I didn’t even see that message. There were three more frantic messages from press secretaries throughout the day, and I didn’t know why — that would have been on Wednesday. And I was home recovering from the exhaustion of the funeral. And so I thought, well, I’ll get to him later.
And then I had more meetings to establish her foundation. So I hadn’t really watched the news until last night.
And I’m not talking to the president now. I’m sorry. After what he said about my child — and it's not that I saw somebody else's tweets about him; I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the protesters like Ms. Heyer with the KKK and the white supremacists.
She concluded with a simple message to Trump: “Think before you speak.”
Bro is referring to Trump’s comments in which he argued that “both sides” were culpable for the violence that broke out in Charlottesville last weekend. The reality is that it was white supremacists who descended on Charlottesville to defend a monument to Robert E. Lee (who fought to maintain slavery in the US), then prompted counterprotesters to respond by rallying against racism. On top of that, the white supremacists there were the ones responsible for Heyer’s death — Bro’s daughter was killed when a Nazi sympathizer drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.
In short, Bro saw through Trump’s false equivalency — and also saw it as insulting to her daughter’s legacy. So she wants Trump to leave her alone.
