Trump says House ‘Squad’ congresswomen should ‘apologize’ to him after ‘go back’ tweet
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is not backing down after calling on minority Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to the countries of their ancestry, tweeting on Monday that they should apologize – not him.
The president on Sunday drew immediate outrage from Democratic members and other critics when he lashed out at a handful of freshman House Democrats who have been in a war of words with Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California while also sharply criticizing Trump since before they took office in January. They also support impeachment proceedings against him, something that has angered him for months.
He took to Twitter before a round of golf Sunday _ he also played Saturday at his Sterling, Va., club _ to say Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts all originally are from “complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.”
(FACT CHECK: Three of the women are United States citizens who were born here. Omar was born in Somalia, but is a U.S. citizen.)
Trump then fired off a second Sunday tweet with this broadside that likely will please his conservative base: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”
But as the workweek began, Trump did what he so often does with his rhetorical battles: He doubled down. (On policy matters, however, he has shown a pattern of talking tough before backing down. He did so again last week with his decision to drop a push to add a citizenship question to the census.)
The White House on Monday zeroed in on Omar, who was pressured into apologizing earlier this year for comments even many Democrats described as anti-semetic.
“If the Democrats choose to want to unite around Omar, it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out for them,” Marc Short, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, said in a TV interview.
Short, who has been Trump’s top congressional envoy and a leading public defender, urged critics who call the president “racist” to look at the “reality of who serves in Donald Trump’s Cabinet.” Just what Short meant is unclear because most of Trump’s Cabinet is white; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson is black and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao was born in Taipei and has Chinese parents.
Short contended that Trump’s Sunday tweet was him “making a point about a great frustration that a lot of people feel: It’s hard to find anything that Ilan-omar has said since elected to Congress that’s positive about the United States of America.”