President Trump on Sunday continued to target four progressive lawmakers known as the “squad,” while his senior advisers pushed back against assertions from Democrats that he was racist.
Mr. Trump kicked off the fight a week ago by saying the four Democratic lawmakers, all of them minority women, should return to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” and “fix” them. On Sunday the president tweeted from his New Jersey golf club that he doesn’t think the U.S. House lawmakers are “capable of loving our country.”
That followed similar suggestions last week that the four lawmakers—Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts—hate the U.S.
His advisers, speaking on Sunday political shows, said his rhetoric was policy-focused. “Look, I have worked with President Trump for two years and he is not a racist,” said Mercedes Schlapp, a senior adviser to the president’s re-election bid, on ABC’s “This Week.” “He’s a compassionate man whose policies have focused on the minority community.”
Earlier on the same show, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) said the president was racist. “Yes, no doubt about it,” he said.
“He’s actually using racist tropes and racial language for political gain, trying to use this as a weapon to divide our nation against itself,” New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Mr. Booker is a Democratic presidential candidate.
The U.S. House, controlled by Democrats, on Tuesday approved a resolution largely along party lines condemning Mr. Trump’s tweets as racist.
The rhetoric got more heated last week after Trump supporters at a rally Wednesday in North Carolina chanted “send her back” about Ms. Omar, who was born in Somalia. Ms. Schlapp on the Sunday show said Mr. Trump disavowed that chant the following day, although on Friday the president called the rally attendees patriots.
“I’m sure you have been to a Trump rally,” Ms. Schlapp said. “There’s a lot of emotion. There’s a lot going on. He continued with his speech.”
Mr. Trump in a Saturday tweet about the North Carolina rally said, “I did nothing to lead people on, nor was I particularly happy with their chant. Just a very big and patriotic crowd.”
Write to Tarini Parti at Tarini.Parti@wsj.com
Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Comments