In what appears to be serious backtracking on his disavowal of the “Send her back” chanters at his Wednesday rally, Donald Trump once again answered reporters’ questions today about his attacks on the four Democratic Congresswomen now known affectionately as “The Squad.”
Trump’s original tweets have already drawn a lot of fact-checking due to the changing stories behind what the President “actually” meant by what he said. At one point his senior advisor Kellyanne Conway even said that Trump was referring to these lawmakers going back to the countries their ancestors were from, although unless AOC’s mother was 83 years old when the future Congresswoman was born, she was a US citizen too — Puerto Ricans have been Americans since 1917.
But America knows what Trump meant, including his followers, despite them having such a good time feigning ignorance at the fact that “go back to where you came from” is such a racist thing to say that the phrase is actually specifically listed in American-anti-discrimination laws. It’s so racist it’s illegal to say at work.
Today, Trump overturned the apple cart of pretense and moved straight into making things up outright.
Part of that, of course, is Trump’s nature as a storyteller, however bad at it he may be. He uses the same talking points so often, constantly repeating and embellishing anecdotes. But CNN’s Daniel Dale, who rose to prominence through his fearless reporting and fact-checking with the Toronto Star, live-tweeted the President’s comments this afternoon, including the usual nonsense about how much everyone loves him and the standard deflections for questions like, “Aren’t you complaining about the country when you say ‘Make America Great Again’?”
What stuck with Dale was two accusations that Trump made against Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez: He aggressively asserted that Omar had used the phrase “evil Jews” and that Ocasio-Cortez had called Americans “garbage.”
Now, setting aside the fact that each would have to have suffered brain damage to ever say anything like either of those things and expect to remain in office, it’s not like Trump could have come up with all of that by himself, right?
Actually, one time Omar tweeted that the government of Israel had committed “evil doings,” which is indisputably true. And AOC was actually talking about Americans having to gain only incrementally with policies that aren’t ambitious enough: “This idea of ten percent better from garbage shouldn’t be what we settle for.”
So Trump took tiny grains of truth — they did actually utter the words “garbage” and “evil” — and turned them into a story that never took place.
He is CLEARLY not ready to put this issue to rest.
Featured image via screen capture
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