A divided House voted Tuesday to condemn President Trump’s racist remarks telling four minority congresswomen to “go back” to their ancestral countries, with all but a handful of Republicans dismissing the rebuke as harassment while many Democrats pressed their leaders for harsher punishment of the president.
The imagery of the 240-to-187 vote was stark: A diverse Democratic caucus cast the president’s words as an affront to millions of Americans and descendants of immigrants, while Republican lawmakers — the vast majority of them white men — stood with Trump against a resolution that rejected his “racist comments that have legitimized fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”
Trump insisted in a string of tweets Tuesday morning that he’s not a racist — “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!” he wrote — and the top two Republicans in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) made identical statements when pressed on Trump’s remarks: “The president is not a racist.”