The racist signal Donald Trump sent to his base has been received – loud and clear.

“Send Her Back” – the new “Lock Her Up” – a chilling refrain roared with a renewed vigour by a majority white crowd toward Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

Trump told his supporters “Omar laughed that Americans speak of al Qaeda in a menacing tone and remarked that you don’t say America with this intensity. You say al Qaeda, makes you proud. Al Qaeda makes you proud. You don’t speak that way about America.”

Ilhan Omar has never praised al Qaeda – but that doesn’t matter to the president or this crowd – invigorated by their new targets: four democratic congresswomen – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib who the president has called “the four horsewomen of the apocalypse”.

It all started of course when he tweeted that each of the Americans could go back to the “crime infested places from which they came”. They are fighting back against the man Tlaib says is the biggest bully she’s ever had to deal with.

The US House of Representatives has voted to symbolically condemn Trump for the racist tweets.

But his loyalists don’t see it that way. They don’t think Trump is racist. They see logic: you don’t like it – leave. The contradiction of Trump’s entire 2016 campaign being based on bashing America and the quest to make it “great again” – is lost.

Since being elected last year Congresswoman Omar must have grown accustomed to be targeted by the right. Her elevation to public enemy number one must be deeply unsettling.

In response to tonight’s display she tweeted a quote from Maya Angelou, the American poet, singer and civil rights activist: “You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise.”

This whole racism row has only re-rallied Trump’s base once again, stoking their worst instincts to frightening effect.

Source: Read Full Article