By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
President Donald Trump has given new meaning to the “White House.”
From his perch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he hurls racist epithets
via tweet while
commanding armed agents to terrorize immigrants at the border and in
communities from coast to coast.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summed it up well, commenting last week
about Trump’s attempts to insert a citizenship question into the U.S.
Census even after
he was rebuffed by the Supreme Court. She accused Trump of trying to
“Make America White Again.”
It is well known that Trump is a voracious consumer of Fox News. On
Sunday morning, just 20 minutes after “Fox & Friends” ran a piece
attacking Congressmembers
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida
Tlaib, Trump tweeted:
“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who
originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and
total catastrophe
… loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States … how
our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the
totally broken
and crime infested places from which they came.”
Go back to where you came from? Three of the women he attacked were
born in the United States: Ocasio-Cortez, born in the Bronx, is the
youngest woman
ever to serve in Congress; Pressley, born in Cincinnati, is the first
African-American congresswoman to represent Massachusetts. Tlaib, born
in Detroit,
is Palestinian-American. She and Ilhan Omar are the first Muslim women
ever elected to Congress.
Omar is also the first congresswoman to wear a hijab. Born in Somalia,
she came to the U.S. as a political refugee when she was a child. As
one viral video
pointed out, Omar has been a U.S. citizen longer than Trump’s third
wife, first lady Melania Trump, a native of Slovenia.
Trump’s racist tweets united a fractured Democratic Party, quickly
mobilizing support for the four freshmen congresswomen, now referred
to collectively
as “The Squad.”
By Tuesday, a resolution, House Res. 489, “Condemning President
Trump’s racist comments directed at Members of Congress,” was being
debated on the House
floor. Republicans temporarily derailed the debate by invoking an
obscure line contained in the congressional rules that states,
“References to racial
or other discrimination on the part of the President are not in
order.” The original rule book banning use of the word “racist” was
written by Thomas Jefferson,
himself a slave owner, but any irony in that was apparently lost on
the Republicans. The resolution ultimately passed, with four
Republicans voting with
the Democratic majority. While it was the first formal House rebuke of
a sitting president in over 100 years, a more serious motion to
censure Trump was
blocked by Pelosi.
Trump doubled down on his verbal assaults on the four congresswomen,
accusing them of being socialists or communists. Trump’s use of
McCarthy-era attacks
should surprise no one, as his early mentor was Roy Cohn, who served
as Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s lead attorney when destroying thousands of
lives through
red-baiting during the 1950s.
Trump went to North Carolina on Wednesday to hold a campaign rally.
Once again, he went after his favorite targets: women and people of
color, telegraphing
what will likely be a strategy of using racist rhetoric to inflame his
white base. In the midst of his long tirade directed against Ilhan
Omar, the crowd
began chanting, “Send her back! Send her back!”
In his book “The Black History of the White House,” American
University professor Clarence Lusane chronicles the history of the
presidential mansion, from
the slaves forced to build it to the first African American
presidential family, the Obamas.
Lusane writes: “For many African Americans, the ‘white’ of the White
House has meant more than just the building’s color; it has symbolized
the hue and
source of dehumanizing cruelty, domination and exclusion that has
defined the long narrative of whites’ relations to people of color in
the United States.”
On Monday, the four congresswomen who so clearly threaten Trump held a
news conference, denouncing his racism toward them and people of color
overall,
pointing to his policies on migrant detention, family separation and
the threatened ICE raids. Refusing to mention Trump by name, Ayanna
Pressley made
clear whose country this is:
“Despite the occupant of the White House’s attempts to marginalize us
and to silence us, know that we are more than four people. We ran on a
mandate to
advocate for and to represent those ignored, left out and left behind.
Our squad is big. Our squad includes any person committed to building
a more equitable
and just world. That is the work that we want to get back to. Given
the size of this squad and this great nation, we cannot, we will not,
be silenced.”
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