Trump: ‘No regrets’ about sharing Ilhan Omar video
President Donald Trump said he has no regrets about sharing an incendiary video of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and called her “extremely unpatriotic and extremely disrespectful to our country,” as the freshman lawmaker claimed an uptick in threats to her life.
Trump made his comments Monday to local television station KSTP during a trip to Minnesota for an event focused on taxes. He was asked if he had any regrets about a Friday tweet that included video of Omar spliced with images of the twin towers falling on Sept. 11, 2001, in the aftermath of terrorist attacks.
“No, not at all,” Trump said. “Look, she’s been very disrespectful to this country. She’s been very disrespectful, frankly, to Israel. She is somebody that doesn’t really understand, I think life, real life, what it’s all about. It’s unfortunate. She’s got a way about her that’s very, very bad I think for our country. I think she’s extremely unpatriotic and extremely disrespectful to our country.”
Omar, one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, has drawn criticism from conservatives for a speech last month in which, they say, she downplayed the 2001 terrorist attacks. She was at the center of an earlier controversy over tweets and a speech criticizing the pro-Israel lobby.
Omar, speaking at an event hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations last month, was discussing Islamophobia and the treatment of Muslims after 9/11, when she said, “some people did something” that caused all Muslims “to lose access to our civil liberties.” When the video surfaced last week, conservatives seized on her vague description of the terrorists as anti-American.
But it was the president’s tweet that escalated the controversy and caused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to call for increased security for Omar, her family and her offices.
On Monday, Pelosi said Trump’s tweet was “beneath the dignity of the Oval Office.”
A Trump official mocked the death threats to Omar. As first reported by Mother Jones, Lynne Patton, the highest-ranking black woman in the Trump administration, on Saturday shared on her personal Instagram account an image that read: “Ilhan Omar is crying she’s receiving death threats. They’re not death threats. Just some people saying something.” Threats on the life of Rep. Ilhan Omar have increased since President Donald Trump released an incendiary video of her.