A NEW TWITTER LOW FOR TRUMP

“Go back to where you came from.” It’s a crude, time-worn racist taunt, said Afua Hirsch in The Guardian. Every black and brown person in a Western country has had it flung at them, regardless of where they were actually born. It signals that to be a visible minority is always to be an immigrant – and that to be an immigrant is “bad”. Now such remarks are emanating from the White House. On Sunday, Donald Trump took to Twitter to attack four non-white Democratic congresswomen known as “the Squad”, who had criticised conditions for migrants on the US-Mexico border. “So interesting,” Trump tweeted, “to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe”, telling “the greatest and most powerful nation on Earth” how to run things. Before doing so, he said, they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”.

The women couldn’t “go back”, said The Boston Globe. All four – Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (above, left to right) – are US citizens. Three were born in the US (one is African-American). Omar arrived from Somalia as a child. So even by his standards, Trump’s “rant” was outrageous, and the House of Representatives rightly voted to condemn it. It marks a new low in terms of “explicit racism” and “dog-whistle rhetoric” in US politics. Trump has a “simple” theory, said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. “If you are white, you have a legitimate claim to American citizenship and everything that comes with it. If you’re not, then you don’t.” It explains much about his behaviour, said David Remnick in The New Yorker – from his “slimy stratagems”, as a 1970s real-estate developer, to keep people of colour out of his buildings, to his promotion of “birtherism”, the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya. And since becoming president, his views have become clearer: black athletes who criticise police violence are “sons of bitches”; African countries are “shitholes”; and there were “fine people” among the bigoted thugs on the infamous 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

The problem is that the “spasms of apoplexy” Trump has provoked are all part of his strategy, said Freddy Gray in The Spectator. With US elections looming, he can see that “edgy” left-wingers like Ocasio-Cortez are dragging the Democratic party out of its “comfort zone”. The more he can keep them in the news, he reasons, the better his chances in 2020. It’s a mistake, said The Wall Street Journal. The Democrats want nothing more than for the 2020 election “to be about his words and behaviour”, rather than his economic policies. With the economy motoring along, they’ll lose a debate over results, but they’ll win “a referendum on character”. So Trump was “politically stupid”. But he was morally wrong, too. As one senior Republican put it, the president should “aim higher”.