Donald Trump is drowning
Back when Donald Trump’s white supremacist and Nazi supporters held a hate rally in Charlottesville and one of them murdered a woman, Trump initially claimed there were fine people on “both sides” of the incident, before the tidal wave of backlash forced him to weakly and belatedly condemn his own racist supporters. Later, he let it be known that he regretted having backed down. Now Trump finds himself in another tepid flip flopping moment, once again involving his racist base.
Donald Trump spent all week pushing the notion that non-white Congresswomen should “go back” to where they came from (even if they were born here), and piled on by telling them that “you can leave.” Then he held a de facto Klan rally on Wednesday night, and after he hurled a number of xenophobic insults at Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, his supporters began chanting “send her back.”
The pushback was so swift and fierce that even some Republicans in Congress began meekly expressing “concern” in public – their way of begging Trump to back down. Trump obliged by tweeting that he disagreed with the chant and that he had nothing to do with it. But that didn’t get him anywhere, because the media is finally at a point where it flat out calls him a racist when he does these things, and then refuses to stop calling him a racist when he pretends to back down from it. And of course Trump is in danger of losing his base whenever he backs down from his racism.
So now Donald Trump is doing what he does best: tepidly flip flopping. He’s now claiming that the people chanting “send her back” are merely a “patriotic crowd” of people who “love the USA.” Wait, which one is it? Does he disagree with the racist chanters, or is he praising them for their racist chant? As is so often the case, Trump is paddling himself in circles trying to avoid drowning in his own con game – and he’s not pulling it off.
