Republicans Are Going to Great Lengths to Distract from Trump’s Racism
A week has passed since Donald Trump tweeted
an undeniably racist message about four Democratic congresswomen, telling
them to “go back” to the “crime
infested places from which they came.” But the outrage hasn’t abated. Nor
should it. And Republicans are still struggling to figure out how to respond.
At the core of
Republicans’ response is this primary command: Don’t admit that Trump is a
racist.
Yet his supporters knew exactly what message Trump was sending
when he tweeted that message. This is evidenced by what happened on Wednesday
at a rally at Greenville, North Carolina. As soon as Trump began attacking Rep.
Ilhan Omar, one of the targets of his earlier tweets, the
crowd knew what to do. “Send her back!” they chanted while Trump stood
there, soaking it in, for 13 long seconds.
On Sunday, The
Washington Post published
a deep dive into the fallout from all of this, providing a glimpse behind
the scenes at the White House and in the halls of Congress. Republicans are
still in damage control as they try to put Trump’s racist genie back in the
bottle. For Republicans, being racist is acceptable—as long as you use coded
language and don’t say the loud parts too
loud, as Trump had done. Again.
According to the Post,
“President Trump’s own top aides didn’t think he fully understood what he had
done last Sunday, when he fired off a trio of racist tweets before a trip to
his golf course.”
White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway knew what Trump
had done, and according to the newspaper, she had to explain to Trump why his
statements were being talked about around the world.
Here’s what was going on at the time in Trump’s brain, per
the Post:
Trump defended himself. He had been watching “Fox &
Friends” after waking up. He wanted to elevate the congresswomen, as he had
previously discussed with aides. The Democratic lawmakers — Reps. Ayanna
Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and
Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — were good foils, he had told his advisers, including
campaign manager Brad Parscale. The president said he thought he was
interjecting himself into Democratic Party politics in a good way.
Trump’s lap dog, Sen. Lindsey Graham, urged the president to
“reframe” his racist argument. Advisers crafted new talking points attacking the
four congresswomen. The way out of this, advisers told Trump, was: “Pivot to
patriotism. Focus on their ideas and behavior, not identity.”
More from the Post:
By midday Monday, the Republican battle to minimize the
damage was unfolding on two fronts. The first was an effort to get Trump to
shift his message, without admitting a mistake. The goal, said one senior White
House aide, was to “get the message back to a place where we could defend the
president.”
The idea was to argue that the four congresswomen hated
America and were welcome to leave for that reason. There were other lines
of attack as well. Omar had been condemned earlier in the year for comments
criticizing support for Israel that many Democrats considered anti-Semitic.
Pressley had seemed to suggest a racial litmus test for politics, saying
Democrats don’t need “any more black faces that don’t want to be a black
voice.”
Rep. Liz Cheney stepped in to defend the president, along
with Vice President Mike Pence, the report said. Meanwhile, Democrats in the
House passed a resolution to condemn
Trump’s comments. Republicans thought they could finally move on.
Then the chants happened in
North Carolina.
According to the Post,
“The following morning, Republican leaders, including [Rep. Kevin] McCarthy and
Cheney, huddled at the vice president’s residence to figure out how to deal
with the danger of the chant catching on. Pence agreed to take the matter to
the president.”
But Trump is Trump. So, he lied to the press, claiming he
had asked
his supporters to stop chanting “send her back.” “I started speaking very
quickly,” he added, a claim that was easily disproven by watching the video. Then,
less than 24 hours later, he switched back to siding
with the racist chanters. “As you know, those are incredible people…those
are incredible patriots,” he said on Friday.
The entire Post story
is wild, and it demonstrates just how far Republicans will go to remain loyal
to Trump. Yet Trump must have been bothered by the fact that more than two
dozen White House aides, advisers, and lawmakers spoke to the newspaper about
the ongoing situation.
“The Washington Post Story, about my speech in North
Carolina and tweet, with its phony sources who do not exist, is Fake News,” he tweeted
on Sunday. “The only thing people were talking about is the record setting
crowd and the tremendous enthusiasm, far greater than the Democrats. You’ll see
in 2020!”
Then, per his
advisers’ strategy, he pivoted to the distraction: