The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Trump: I’d rather ralliers don’t chant ‘Send her back!’
CINCINNATI >> President Donald Trump said he would “prefer” that his supporters a rally Thursday night don’t engage in a “Send her back!” chant about a Somali-born congresswoman, after he faced widespread criticism for not doing more to stop the attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar at an event two weeks ago.
Speaking to reporters before leaving the White House for Cincinnati, Trump said he doesn’t know whether they will chant anyway, or what his response would be if they do — adding that, regardless, he “loves” his political supporters.
“I don’t know that you can stop people,” Trump told reporters. “If they do the chant, we’ll have to see what happens.”
The chant about the Minnesota Democrat by a roaring Greenville, North Carolina, crowd last month rattled Republicans and raised the prospect of a 2020 presidential campaign increasingly fought along racial lines. It followed racist tweets Trump sent against Omar and three other firstterm lawmakers of color, instructing them to get out of the U.S. “right now” and saying if the lawmakers “hate our country,” they can go back to their “broken and crime-infested” countries.
Two weeks ago, Trump wavered in his response to the divisive cries, letting the chant roll at the rally, expressing disapproval about it the next day and later retreating from those concerns. Since then, Trump has pushed ahead with incendiary tweets and a series of attacks on a veteran African-American congressman and his predominantly black district in Baltimore. Heightening the drama, Trump’s Ohio rally will come on the heels of a pair of debates among the Democrats who want to replace him and will take place against a backdrop of simmering racial tension in the host city of Cincinnati.
All eyes will be watching both the Ohio crowd’s behavior and how Trump reacts. Even his closest advisers seem uncertain as to what may transpire.
“If it happened again, he might make an effort to speak out about it,” Vice President Mike Pence said recently.
Republican Rep. Steve Chabot, who represents a Cincinnati-area district, said Wednesday he hopes the crowd will avoid such chants this time, and he thinks Trump will react more quickly if does happen.
“I would discourage the crowd from doing anything inappropriate and I think saying something like that would be inappropriate,” Chabot said. “I would hope that the president would silence the crowd, tell them: ‘Hey, don’t do that, there’s no place for that. It’s not helpful, it’s not right.’”
Long accused of weaponizing race for political gain, Trump has escalated his harsh language in recent weeks, beginning with racist tweets about Omar, the Minnesota congresswoman who moved to the United States as a child, and her Democratic House colleagues Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
Days later, the Greenville crowd’s “Send her back!” shouts resounded for 13 seconds as Trump paused in his speech and took in the uproar. Democrats condemned the scene and GOP lawmakers scrambled to denounce it lest the moment come to define their party heading into the next election. Though not faulting Trump himself, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California said the chant had “no place in our party and no place in this country.”