Trump disavows rally chant of ‘send her back’

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump disavowed Thursday the “send her back” chant that broke out at his re-election rally Wednesday night when he railed against a Somaliborn congresswoman, as Republicans in Congress rushed to distance themselves and their party from the ugly refrain.

Trump said he was “not happy” with the chant, directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Muslim freshman Democrat whom the president has singled out repeatedly for verbal excoriation. On Thursday he claimed he had tried to cut off the chant, an assertion contradicted by video of the event. Asked 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 looked around silently and paused as the scene unfolded in front of him, doing nothing to halt the chorus.

“I was not happy with it,” Trump said Thursday at the White House. “I disagree with it.

“I didn’t say that,” he added. “They did.”

Trump’s effort to dissociate himself from his own supporters reflected the misgivings of his allies, who have flooded the upper echelons of his team with expressions of concern in the wake of a rally that veered into racist territory. Among them were House Republican leaders, who pleaded with Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday morning to separate the party from the message embraced by the crowd in Greenville, North Carolina.

“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, who attended the rally and tweeted hours later that he had “struggled” with the chant. “We cannot be defined by this.”

Omar, a Somalian refugee who is one of the first two Muslim women elected to the House, called Trump a “fascist” but said there was nothing new about his behavior or the response of his supporters. “He does that every single day, and it’s no different,” Omar said at the Capitol.

Walker said he had raised the issue with Pence on Thursday, saying the chant was “something that we want to address early,” before it becomes a staple of the president’s rallies. “We felt like this was going to be part of our discussion, to make sure that we are not defined by that.”

Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned the chant as “hurtful, wrong and completely unacceptable.”

“I want everyone in Canada to know that those comments are completely unacceptable and should not be allowed, encouraged in Canada,” Trudeau told reporters in Montreal during a news conference.

The incident occurred at an event in North Carolina after Trump mentioned Omar. She is one of four female Democrats elected last year who Trump said should “go back” to the country they came from, comments he first made Sunday on Twitter that have been widely criticized as racist.

The other three women were born in the United States. Omar became a citizen when she was a teenager.

“I felt a little bit badly about it,” Trump said about the chant from his supporters.