Coveney condemns Trump’s ‘go home’ taunt to Democrats
Tánaiste: US president is ‘fuelling hatred based on race’
‘The things he says are racist to me’ ‘I don’t have a racist bone in my body’
SIMON Coveney launched a blistering attack on Donald Trump yesterday, accusing the US president of ‘fuelling hatred based on race’ by telling four Democratic congresswomen they should get out of America.
Over the weekend, Mr Trump tweeted that four congresswomen should ‘go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came’.
Mr Trump made his comments despite three of the women being born in the US and the fourth, Ilhan Omar, being a US citizen since she was a teenager.
The president suggested the women could later ‘come back and show us how it’s done. They can’t leave fast enough’.
Mr Trump continued his criticism in the following days. At a rally on Wednesday night in North Carolina, he called out Ms Omar by name to which the crowd responded by chanting ‘send her back’.
While Taoiseach Leo Varadkar yesterday stopped short of calling Mr Trump a racist, Mr Coveney pulled no punches.
Reacting to a video of Mr Trump at the North Carolina rally on Twitter, Mr Coveney wrote: ‘This is chilling... targeting individuals, fuelling hatred based on race is not acceptable in political discourse... history tells us where this leads!’
Mr Varadkar said Mr Trump’s comments bore the ‘hallmarks of racism’, but declined to call him racist.
Pressed on the matter by Seán O’Rourke on RTÉ Radio One yesterday, Mr Varadkar said: ‘It certainly had the hallmarks of racism. I am not calling president Trump a racist by any means, but some of the things he says are racist to me.’
The Taoiseach, who has Indian ancestry and who welcomed Mr Trump to Ireland last month, was then asked if he had ever been told to go back where he came from. ‘Not by a politician, I don’t think, or a journalist, but if you go on to Twitter and scroll down and read the comments, there’s plenty of racism and homophobia there. But I am a big boy I can take it,’ Mr Varadkar said.
Mr Trump’s comments, and the subsequent chanting by the rally crowd, have been widely condemned.
The president was taking aim at the group of congresswomen known as ‘the squad’, which includes Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
During his 90-minute speech at the rally, Mr Trump was eager to rile up his base with some of the same kind of rhetoric he aimed at minorities and women in his 2016 election campaign.
‘I think in some cases they hate our country,’ Mr Trump told the crowd on Wednesday.
He went through a list of what he deemed offensive comments by each woman, misrepresenting and misconstruing many facts throughout the speech.
Ms Omar responded to Mr Trump on Twitter, with one of her messages quoting a line from African-American writer Maya Angelou’s defiant poem Still I Rise: ‘You may shoot me with your words... But still, like air, I’ll rise.’
‘I am where I belong, at the people’s house and you’re just gonna have to deal!’ she wrote in another.
Mr Trump has continued to double down on his comments. Prior to leaving Washington DC for the rally, he told reporters: ‘If people want to leave our country, they can.
‘If they don’t want to love our country, if they don’t want to fight for our country, they can.’
The four Democratic congresswomen have portrayed the Republican president as a bully who wants to ‘vilify’ not only immigrants but all people of colour.
The Democratic-led US House of Representatives voted earlier in the week to condemn Trump’s comments, despite being opposed by almost every Republican member.
The president later defended himself by tweeting: ‘I don’t have a racist bone in my body.’
On Wednesday, the house blocked a bid to launch impeachment proceedings against Mr Trump, with speaker Nancy Pelosi reluctant to begin proceedings which could possibly unseat the president.
Mr Trump hasn’t shown signs of being rattled by the house rebuke and called the failed impeachment resolution ‘ridiculous’.