Trump retreats from ‘send her back’
GOP leaders, Ivanka urged president to repudiate rally chant
WASHINGTON — Nervous Republicans, from senior members of Congress to his own daughter Ivanka, urged President Donald Trump on Thursday to repudiate the “send her back” chant directed at a Somali-born congresswoman during his speech the night before at a rally in North Carolina, amid widespread fears that the rally had veered into territory that could hurt their party in 2020.
In response, Trump disavowed the behavior of his own supporters in comments to reporters at the White House and claimed that he had tried to contain it, an assertion clearly contradicted by video of the event.
Trump said he was “not happy” with the chant directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, DMinn. At the rally Wednesday evening, the president had been in the middle of denouncing her as an anti-American leftist who has spoken in “vicious, anti-Semitic screeds,” when the chant was taken up by the crowd.
Pressed on why he did not stop
it, Trump said, “I think I did — I started speaking very quickly.” In fact, as the crowd roared “send her back,” Trump paused and looked around silently for more than 10 seconds as the scene unfolded in front of him, doing nothing to halt the chorus. “I didn’t say that,” he added. “They did.”
Trump’s cleanup attempt reflected the misgivings of political allies who have warned him privately that however much his hard-core supporters in the arena might have enjoyed the moment, the president was playing with political fire, according to people briefed on the conversations.
Among them were House Republican leaders, who pleaded with Vice President Mike Pence to distance the party from the message embraced by the crowd in Greenville, N.C. Pence conveyed that message directly to Trump, according to people familiar with the exchange.
“That does not need to be our campaign call, like we did the ‘lock her up’ last time,” said Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., a top official in the party’s messaging arm, referring to the chant that has broken out virtually every time Trump has mentioned Hillary Clinton at gatherings of his supporters since the 2016 campaign. Midway through that campaign, Trump told reporters he did not approve of that chant but he never intervened on the many occasions it occurred.
Walker, who attended the rally Wednesday night, later posted on Twitter that he had “struggled” with the chant. “We cannot be defined by this,” he said.
Trump’s inner circle immediately appreciated the gravity of the rally scene and quickly urged him to repudiate the chant. Ivanka Trump, his elder daughter and senior adviser, spoke to the president about it Thursday morning before he left the White House residence, the people familiar with the discussions said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The retreat by Trump reflects a larger issue for Republicans as they devise a strategy for the election. There is wide agreement in the party that branding Democrats as radicals in favor of open borders and grandiose proposals like the Green New Deal could be a powerful argument in their attempt to hold the White House and make further inroads in Congress.
But while Omar and her fellow liberal freshmen who make up “the squad” — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — are particularly good embodiments of that radicalism for Republicans, there is also concern that suggesting they leave the country makes the argument too personal and could backfire.
Trump’s freewheeling campaign rallies — at which he aims for maximum entertainment value by testing boundaries and breaking taboos, all while his enthusiastic supporters egg him on with cheers and chants — encourage that kind of language. The feedback loop is so familiar by now that Trump’s staff, fearing something like what wound up happening Wednesday night, explicitly warned him before the rally that the crowd would follow his lead as he spoke about Omar and to be careful not to let things spin out of control.
Even before Wednesday’s rally, his aides and advisers had spent days trying to manage the fallout from the president’s initial Sunday tweets calling on the four Democratic congresswomen, who he said “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe,” to “go back” and “help fix” them.
All of them are U.S. citizens, and all but Omar, a Somali refugee, were born in the United States.
After the rally, Trump made no mention of any concern. “Just returned to the White House from the Great State of North Carolina. What a crowd, and what great people,” he tweeted.
Congressional Republicans, who offered only muted protest over the president’s initial remarks about the congresswomen, gave a more vocal response to the spectacle in Greenville. Some suggested that the episode, with its intimations of political persecution and even physical force, had violated sacred democratic norms.
“Those chants have no place in our party or our country,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, told reporters.
Even as they denounced the crowd’s chant, however, Republican leaders Thursday declined to criticize Trump personally.
“There’s no place for that kind of talk,” Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota said to reporters in Washington after being asked about the chant. But, he added, “There’s not a racist bone in the president’s body.”
Walker said he had raised the issue with Pence at a breakfast Thursday, saying the chant was “something that we want to address early,” before it became a staple of the president’s arenastyle rallies. “We felt like this was going to be part of our discussion, to make sure that we are not defined by that.”
Omar responded Thursday by calling Trump a “fascist” but said there was nothing new about his behavior or the response of his supporters. She cited his years of false claims that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
“He does that every single day, and it’s no different,” Omar said at the Capitol. “What I’m going to be busy doing is uplifting people, and making sure they understand: Here in this country we are all Americans, we are all welcome, regardless of what he says.”