October 23, 2024 10:08 AM UTC

The Tragedy Of Mayor Mike's Cowardly Refusal To Say Trump's Name

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• by: Colorado Pols

Susan Greene reports for the Aurora Sentinel on Mayor Mike Coffman’s State of the City address delivered yesterday, the first report back to the citizens of Aurora after ex-President Donald Trump traveled to the edge of town earlier this month to expound on the fiction that the city has been “taken over” by migrant gangs, with the whole state of Colorado the next helpless target. As we’ve covered in this space, Coffman early on helped spread the false stories that ultimately brought Trump to town to amplify, only changing his tune after the economic and reputational damage to the city became intolerable.

But yesterday, Mayor Mike sounded like any uncertainty over the truth of what’s going on in his city is resolved:

Mayor Mike Coffman started his state of the city speech Tuesday by lamenting one of the worst black eyes Aurora has endured since the 2012 theater shooting: A false narrative by Donald Trump and far-right Republicans this campaign season that Venezuelan gang members have overrun the city.

“To let that narrative stand has consequences to the city, real consequences for businesses that are thinking about moving here, for conventions that are thinking about coming here,” he said. “What is important as mayor is to stand up and to never, never let anyone sacrifice the interest of this city for a political campaign. Never, never.” [Pols emphasis]

The problem, of course, is that’s what Mayor Mike initially did, and other less responsible actors like City Councillor Danielle Jurinsky are still doing:

Without mentioning Trump by name Tuesday, Coffman referred to the former president’s remarks as “unfortunate.”

Most of the council’s 11 members attended the luncheon, although Jurinsky was absent.

Although Mayor Coffman has been described in some news reports as regretful of his own role in spreading the misinformation that snowballed into a central Trump campaign talking point, he has never taken public responsibility for this consequential mistake. Instead, Coffman blames Trump for the unfounded tales Coffman helped push up the conservative media food chain, while refusing to say Trump’s name–and inexplicably says that despite all of the harm Trump has done to Aurora by amplifying this false narrative of a city under siege, he still intends to vote for Trump.

By staying consistent recently and continuing to push back against “crisis comms” from the slumlord whose decaying apartment buildings led to the controversy well before the “migrant invasion” became an election-year talking point, Coffman has tried to walk back his earlier mistakes. But by refusing to directly confront even his own rogue city councilor, let alone Donald Trump–who Coffman seems to support more today than when Trump kicked Coffman on his way out of Congress in 2018, despite everything that has happened since then–Coffman is failing Aurora where he is needed most. As a Republican former member of Congress, Coffman could be a powerful voice of sanity calling out Trump’s appeal to the lowest common denominator of American politics, fear and hatred, in the campaign’s final weeks.

Instead, Coffman is a poster boy for every Republican’s moral compromise in 2024.

Cowardice Trumped his conscience.