Tag: Trump racism

Trump blames his supporters for echoing his racist words

The president waited until the crowd at his North Carolina rally finished chanting “send her back” before he resumed speaking.

President Donald Trump on Thursday attempted to distance himself from the racist “Send her back!” chant supporters shouted at a rally in North Carolina the night before.

The president specifically blamed his supporters for starting the chant, saying he was unhappy with their words, ignoring the fact that they were simply a repetition of his own racist tweets days earlier.

When asked why he didn’t stop the chant, Trump pushed back. “Number one, I think I did. I started speaking very quickly,” he said.

View the complete July 18 article by Zack Ford on the ThinkProgress website here.

‘Send her back’ chant chills Washington

Some Republicans criticize crowd at Trump rally; McConnell says Trump is ‘onto something’ with attacks on progressive ‘squad’

The words “send her back” briefly drowned out the President Donald Trump’s speech in Greenville, North Carolina, last night, and quickly sent chills through Washington.

Trump carried his screed against Rep. Ilhan Omar from Twitter on to the stage of a campaign stop Wednesday night, prompting supporters to respond that he should “send her back” to the country she emigrated from as a child. The moment stoked fear about both the safety of the congresswoman and about the ramifications of the nation’s most powerful politician inflaming racial and religious hatred.

The president’s Democratic rivals rapidly condemned his diatribe and the crowd’s approving chant as “racist,”“vile”and “disturbing.”

View the complete July 18 article by Emily Kopp on The Roll Call website here.

Pence’s deputy press secretary makes mind-boggling argument that Elaine Chao is a better immigrant than Ilhan Omar

AlterNet logoDuring a “Make America Great Again” rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night, President Donald Trump doubled down on his racist assertion that four congresswomen of color should leave the United States and reiterated his disdain for Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota while the crowd chanted, “Send her back, send her back.” Trump’s critics have been pointing out that prominent Republicans such as First Lady Melania Trump and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao are immigrants — and Vice President Mike Pence’s deputy press secretary, Darin Miller, is responding with a mind-boggling claim that Chao is a good immigrant while Omar is not.

Mother Jones’ Matt Cohen is reporting that he received an e-mail from Miller stating that while Chao (who is originally from Mainland China and is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) “worked hard and assimilated” after coming to the United States, Omar “seems content to criticize America at every turn.”

Miller, according to Cohen, wrote to the Mother Jones reporter to explain that he believed he misconstrued comments that Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, made during a Fox News appearance on Monday. Short, defending Trump, insisted that the president can’t have “racist motives” because he appointed a Chinese immigrant to an important position in his administration.

View the complete July 18 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

New Poll: Majority Says Trump’s Racist Attack Is ‘Un-American’

Just hours after Republicans voted almost unanimously in favor of Trump’s racist attack on four Democratic congresswomen, a new poll shows that most Americans consider Trump’s actions to be “un-American.”

On Tuesday, 187 House Republicans refused to vote for a resolution condemning Trump for telling the congresswoman to “go back” to where they came from. All of the women are of color and American citizens.

The measure passed with the support of the entire Democratic caucus. Only four Republicans voted for it, along with newly independent Rep. Justin Amash (MI).

View the complete July 17 by Oliver Willis on the National Memo website here.

Who Hates America?

Nobody expects Donald Trump to speak the truth about himself or his opponents anymore. To support him requires a suspension of disbelief that is impressive in a misbegotten way.

So when the president of the United States tells four duly elected members of Congress to go back to where they came from, an old trope of bigotry that everybody understands, the politicians who support him pretend that he was saying something else. Even his rank-and-file backers know how to play dumb — like the gentleman who told NPR that Trump was merely telling Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley to “go back to their home states.” Sorry, but nobody is really that stupid, although Trump and his minions treat us all as if we are.

Behind Trump’s rhetorical tactics lies what psychologists call projection: Each accusation he lodges against adversaries is emblematic of his own character. Defaming the four women of color, he said, “They hate our country. They hate it, I think, with a passion.” He said they express “a love for enemies like Al Qaeda.” And he was merely inviting them to leave the United States “if they want to leave,” which they must because “they’re doing nothing but criticizing us all the time.”

View the complete July 19 article by Joe Conason on the National Memo website here.

A political scientist explains how a bunch of dangerous myths brought us the ‘president for white people’

AlterNet logoToday’s Republican Party is the largest, most powerful and most dangerous white racist organization in the United States — if not the world. Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is its leader. These are plain if not understated facts. No embellishment is needed. The examples are many.  Over the last few days Donald Trump has repeatedly dug into his bucket of racist political scatology, saying on Twitter and elsewhere that four nonwhite members of Congress (“Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen,” as he mockingly put it) should leave America and go back to their own “crime infested” and “totally broken” countries.

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib were all born in the United States. Rep. Ilhan Omar is a naturalized citizen who was born in Somalia. This is not the first time that Donald Trump has said such vile things, which are almost word-for-word white supremacist or white nationalist talking points about how being a “real American” means one must first and foremost be “white” — and that nonwhites should be removed from the United States if they do not submit to white rule and authority.

Trump’s racism is part of a much larger pattern of white supremacist behavior by his administration: Interning nonwhite migrants and immigrants in concentration camps, seeking to ban Muslims from entering the United States, suggesting that black athletes who oppose police brutality are traitors, changing the country’s immigration laws with the aim of maintaining a white majority, and disenfranchising nonwhite people through gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter intimidation and other tactics, legal and otherwise.

View the complete article by Chauncey DeVega from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

McConnell stumped after reporter asks if it’s OK to tell his immigrant wife to ‘go back to your country’

AlterNet logoSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday refused to condemn President Donald Trump’s racist attack against progressive members of Congress — suggesting instead that both Democrats and Republicans alike needed to tone down their rhetoric.

During a press conference, McConnell was asked if it would be racist to use similar language towards his wife Elaine Chao, who is currently the U.S. Secretary of Transportation.

“You’re married to an immigrant naturalized citizen,” a reporter noted. “If someone were to say to her, ‘you should go back to your country’ because of her criticisms of federal policies, wouldn’t you consider that a racist attack?”

View the complete July 16 article by Eric W. Dolan from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

 

White House readies immigration plan amid uproar over Trump’s ‘go back’ remarks

Washington Post logoAs the uproar over President Trump’s racist remarks demanding four minority Democratic lawmakers “go back [to countries] from which they came” continued to flare Tuesday, the White House prepared to roll out a plan that would detail the type of immigrants the administration wants to admit to the United States.

But the ongoing controversy over Trump’s comments got in the way of the White House’s initial plans, as a late-afternoon meeting with a half-dozen congressional Republican leaders on the administration’s new immigration bill was abruptly postponed amid an unexpectedly drawn-out fight on the floor of the House as lawmakers debated condemning Trump’s racist tweets.

That interruption Tuesday is far from the only obstacle the White House will face this year as it tries to generate momentum for its new immigration plan, which aims to reorient the current legal immigration system to one based primarily on an immigrant’s ability to contribute to the economy, rather than on family ties.

View the complete July 16 article by Seung Min Kim on The Washington Post website here.

President Trump accuses Rep. Omar of supporting al-Qaeda

Washington Post logo“I look at Omar. I don’t know. I never met her. I hear the way she talks about al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda has killed many Americans. She said, ‘You can hold your chest out, you can — when I think of America, huh, when I think of al-Qaeda, I can hold my chest out.’ When she talked about the World Trade Center being knocked down, ‘Some people.’ You remember the famous ‘some people’?”

— President Trump, in remarks at the White House, July 15, 2019

“When I hear people speaking about how wonderful al-Qaeda is, when I hear people talking about ‘some people,’ ‘some people’ with the World Trade Center. Some people? No, not ‘some people.’ Much more than ‘some people’.”

— Trump

“A politician that hears somebody, where we’re at war with al-Qaeda, and sees somebody talking about how great al-Qaeda is. Pick out her statement. That was Omar. ‘How great al-Qaeda is.’ And we’re losing great soldiers to al-Qaeda.”

— Trump

The president accused Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) of supporting the terrorist group behind the 9/11 attacks.

Omar, a Somali American and practicing Muslim, was elected to Congress in 2018. She’s a member of “the Squad,” an informal group of liberal Democrats that also includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.).

Trump lashed out at the foursome in a Twitter statement Sunday, telling them to “go back” to their countries. Asked about those racist comments the next day, Trump alleged that Omar has voiced support for al-Qaeda. “When I think of al-Qaeda, I can hold my chest out,” Trump quoted Omar as saying.

View the complete July 17 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.