Moments after President Trump took to Twitter to tell Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to where “they came” from, the hosts of his favorite cable news morning program laughed while reading the president’s racist comments, calling them “very comedic” before claiming Trump was “making an important point.”
Other journalists and politicians, however, slammed the president for essentially telling a black woman to go back to Africa.
In his Sunday morning tweetstorm, Trump said it was “interesting” that progressive Democratic congresswomen were “loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States” how the government should be run, considering they “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.”
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“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done,” Trump added, obviously referencing a group of four progressive freshmen congresswomen referred to as the “Squad.” (Three of the four women were born and raised in the United States, while Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is a U.S. citizen who moved from Somalia when she was a young child.)
His tweets immediately sparked outrage.
The New York Times’ Astead Herndon said it was important to “note the historic context of the ‘go back to’ insult is racial,” adding that people “tell black people to go ‘back to Africa’ whose families have lived here for generations.” National security lawyer Bradley Moss, meanwhile, stated that Trump “came out and reminded us all this morning that he is a vile racist at his core,” blasting the “conservatives who sold their souls for judges and got him elected.”
“Anyone with a foreign sounding name and face who grew up in the US (like me) has heard this from the playground to contemporary life,” CNN’s Kyung Lah tweeted. “This morning it’s coming from @realDonaldTrump.”
“When I call the president a racist, this is what I’m talking about,” Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said. “We must stand together for justice and dignity towards all.”
For his part, Matt Wolking, the Trump 2020 campaign’s deputy director of communications, insisted that the president wasn’t actually telling the congresswomen to go back to “where they came” from. “Anyone who says the president told members of Congress to go back to where they came from is lying,” he tweeted, pointing to the president adding, “Then come back and show us how it is done” to his Twitter rant.
Meanwhile, over on Fox & Friends, the hosts had a different take. After the crew laughed while host Griff Jenkins read the president’s tweets on air, Jedediah Bila felt the president was tickling everyone’s funny bones.
“Someone is feeling very comedic today,” she giggled.
Her fellow co-host Todd Piro, chimed in to criticize the congresswomen, calling them the “Instagram group,” while complaining that they need to realize that their words “have real-life consequences.”
“This is real life,” he added. “This isn’t social media.”
Piggybacking on her colleague’s remarks, Bila applauded the president’s racist tirade, claiming he was “making an important point.”
“He’s trying to say that the values that built this country, everything from securing the border and being a nation of laws to, you know, freedom of speech on college campuses, whatever issues you are talking about, a lot of times these are the issues that the left is trying to obstruct,” she declared.
Meanwhile, Fox & Friends very well may have prompted the president's Twitter tirade. Twenty minutes before he told women of color to go back to where they came from, the morning show ran a segment on the Squad and highlighted comments Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley made at Netroots Nation conference in Philadelphia.
