THE BIG IDEA: The four-page resolution of disapproval that the House will take up this week to condemn President Trump’s racist tweetstorm quotes at length from Ronald Reagan’s final speech in the White House.
“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness: We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people – our strength – from every country and every corner of the world,” Reagan said in January 1989. “And, by doing so, we continuously renew and enrich our nation. … Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
Thirty years later, the man who now occupies the White House tweeted that four minority lawmakers – three of whom were born in the United States – should “go back” to “the crime infested places from which they came.” A reporter asked Trump on Monday, “Does it concern you that many people find that tweet racist?”
“It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” the president replied, adding that the four women “hate our country.”
House Republican leadership aides expect few of their members to defect from Trump to support the resolution of disapproval, which could come up for a vote as soon as today. It also says that Trump’s tweets “have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”
Trump’s targets held a news conference at the Capitol last night to respond to the president’s comments. Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) each took turns speaking. Pressley was born in Cincinnati, Tlaib was born in Detroit, and Ocasio-Cortez was born in New York. Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia; her family fled the country amid civil war when she was a child, and she became a U.S. citizen as a teenager.
Ocasio-Cortez, who is of Puerto Rican descent, remembered when she was a girl and her dad brought her to the Reflecting Pool on the Mall. He told her to look around. Then he told her that the monuments she saw, and the nation they represented, belonged to her just as much as anyone else. “I want to tell children across this country,” the congresswoman said last night, “no matter what the president says, this country belongs to you, and it belongs to everyone.”
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1) Trump’s rhetoric is creating a more dangerous climate and corroding the public discourse.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) asked the Capitol Police last night to provide extra protection for the four lawmakers, citing a growing threat profile, per Fox News.
There are also longer-term impacts to consider. For better or worse, the president is a role model. Modeling bad behavior sends signals to young people just as much as good behavior.
Conservative columnist George Will argues that this is why Trump is worse than Richard Nixon. “I believe that what this president has done to our culture, to our civic discourse, you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for schoolboy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream,” the consistent Trump critic said on a New York Times Book Review podcast last week. “This will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon's surreptitious burglaries did."
2) Trump’s “go back” rhetoric is consistent not only with his own long history of attacks on people he perceives as the other but also the nation’s oscillating attitudes toward immigration throughout its history. Marc Fisher traces the etymology: “The Know-Nothings wanted German and Irish immigrants to get out because they were allegedly subversive and diseased people who were stealing American jobs. White preachers and politicians of the 1820s urged freed blacks to move to West Africa, supposedly for their own good. From that drive to encourage blacks to go back where they came from to waves of nativist attacks on Catholics, Jews, Asians and Hispanics in nearly every generation that followed, ‘go home’ rhetoric is as American as immigration itself. …
“There is hardly any ethnic or racial group in the country that hasn’t been told to go back where they came from. In collections of voices from the Japanese American internment camps of the World War II era, in diaries of the earliest Italian and Irish immigrants, in Jewish novels and memoirs from the turn of the 20th century, the slur is a mainstay. … From Calvin Coolidge’s warnings in the 1920s that the country was becoming ‘a dumping ground’ and that ‘America must remain American’ to the ‘America: Love it or leave it’ rhetoric that surrounded Richard Nixon’s presidency, the nation’s leaders have struggled for two centuries with a central ambivalence about its core identity as a magnet for immigrants.”
-- The news media is grappling with how to label Trump’s Sunday tweets, but The Washington Post decided Monday afternoon to use the word racist because of the well-documented history. “The ‘go back’ trope is deeply rooted in the history of racism in the United States. Therefore, we have concluded that ‘racist’ is the proper term to apply to the language he used Sunday,” Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said in a statement.
-- Conservative lawyer George Conway, the husband of counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, explains in an op-ed for The Post why this episode caused him to conclude that Trump is a racist – after years of giving him the benefit of the doubt.
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“Ashley Jardina, a professor at Duke University who recently wrote a book called ‘White Identity Politics,’ said that a majority of white Americans express some racial resentment in election-year surveys. Between 30 and 40 percent embrace a white racial identity. It is the latter group, with concerns about growing immigration threatening their racial status, who gravitated strongly to the president. The feeling of white identity is much stronger among non-college-educated whites than those who went to college, she said. ‘We do know that it is politically mobilizing,’ Jardina added. ‘Those who feel racial solidarity have more likelihood to participate in politics.’ …
“A December 2018 Pew Research Center poll found that 46 percent of white Americans said having a majority nonwhite nation in 2050 would ‘weaken American customs and values.’ … Asked whether having a majority nonwhite population would strengthen American customs and values, 42 percent of Democrats said it would, while only 13 percent of Republicans agreed.”
“Trump is proposing a giant swap: Republicans can no longer count on suburban women and we will continue to lose college-educated men and women, while we increasingly pick up working white Americans without college degrees,” said Ari Fleischer, who was a White House press secretary for President George W. Bush and who has spoken with Trump campaign advisers about their strategy for increasing turnout. “Nobody knows who will come out ahead in the swap,” he told Scherer. “That’s what the campaign will tell us.”
President Trump walks out of the White House on Monday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
4) Trump’s increasingly incendiary rhetoric is being met with fading resistance from Republican and corporate leaders. Making the case that the president’s behavior is being normalized, Toluse Olorunnipa compares the applause Trump got at the White House on Monday to what happened after Trump said Mexican immigrants are rapists, called for a Muslim ban and insisted there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville. “The president, who has grown more comfortable in Washington as he has surrounded himself with assenting voices, has learned over the past three years that there is little consequence within his party or from aligned corporate and religious leaders for embracing incendiary rhetoric and pugilistic attacks,” Toluse writes:
“The business world largely shrugged off Trump’s words, a shift from the kind of forceful response that industry leaders provided after Charlottesville. After Monday’s event at the White House — during which Trump accused members of Congress of hating Jews and loving al-Qaeda — business leaders gathered for the event circled around the president as he signed an executive order. Standing with Trump was Lockheed Martin chief executive Marillyn Hewson, one of the business leaders on Trump’s manufacturing council before it disbanded after the Charlottesville violence. Lockheed spokesman Bill Phelps did not answer questions about whether Hewson approved of Trump’s comments before or during the event.”
-- The New York Times looks at how senior staffers at the White House have grown emboldened as Trump blusters his way through scandals. After Trump defended the neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville, Gary Cohn, his top economic adviser at the time, told the Financial Times that “this administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups,”” Annie Karni notes. “On Monday, Mr. Cohn’s successor in the West Wing, Larry Kudlow, steered clear of the latest flare-up of Mr. Trump’s inflammatory language. ‘That’s way out of my lane,’ Mr. Kudlow said when asked about the president’s weekend tweets. ‘He’s tweeted what he’s tweeted,’ Mr. Kudlow said. ‘You’ll have to talk to him about that.’
“After Charlottesville, Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and a White House adviser, issued her own statement on Twitter, saying there was ‘no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis.’ It was a notable corrective to her father. On Monday, Ms. Trump declined to comment on her father’s latest remarks. … Administration veterans said they had long ago become immune to thinking anything Mr. Trump said would stick to him for more than one news cycle. Indeed, even a year after Charlottesville, Republican lawmakers who distanced themselves from the president had come back to embrace his tax overhaul and his selection of Brett M. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.”
-- “Melania Trump is only the second first lady of the United States not born in America; the first, Louisa Adams was born in England. Yet she's remained silent as her husband tweets racist and xenophobic attacks,” CNN notes.
-- Speaking of Charlottesville: Two weeks after being sentenced to life in prison by a federal judge, the avowed neo-Nazi James A. Fields Jr. received a similar sentence in a Virginia court on Monday for ramming his car into counterprotesters during the white-supremacist rally. In ordering terms of life plus 419 years in state prison, Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Richard Moore imposed the punishment recommended in December by a jury that convicted Fields of first-degree murder and nine other charges, per Laurel Demkovich and Paul Duggan.
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The president suggested that he’s attacking these women to elevate them. “The Dems were trying to distance themselves from the four ‘progressives,’ but now they are forced to embrace them,” he wrote after their presser last night. “That means they are endorsing Socialism, hate of Israel and the USA! Not good for the Democrats!”
A Trump campaign adviser told Jackie Alemany for her Power Up newsletter that Trump's tweets “yet again reinforced in the minds of many Americans that the Democratic Party is the party of AOC and Omar.”
-- But even if there’s some strategy, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good one. Trump has united Democrats after they spent a week in disarray. “Inside the White House, there was some frustration that the president had inserted himself into what was an internal Democratic feud, offering Nancy Pelosi a convenient off-ramp from her disagreements — generational, philosophical and tactical — with the four liberal lawmakers,” Ashley Parker, Rachael Bade and John Wagner report.
Dana Milbank notes that Trump’s latest comments made Democratic bickering over Joe Biden’s relationship with James Eastland in 1973 look small in comparison, a dynamic that could help the former vice president.
-- Looking forward, this gives some momentum to liberals who want impeachment. There is lots of speculation that Trump welcomes impeachment proceedings because he knows Senate Republicans are not going to remove him from office, and he has said his base would rally behind him if Democrats impeach.
Despite the speaker’s opposition, 85 Democrats have publicly called for starting impeachment proceedings against Trump, more than one-third of her caucus. All four of the lawmakers in question have already called for Trump’s impeachment. Omar mentioned impeachment during the news conference. “It’s time for us to impeach this president,” Omar said. “It is time for us to stop allowing him to make a mockery out of this Constitution.”
Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.) said he plans to force a vote on the House floor this month on impeaching Trump. The House voted 364 to 58 in December 2017, with Republicans in the majority, on a motion to table Green’s previous impeachment resolution. Green said Monday that “the American people are fed up” with his racism and bigotry and that the Sunday tweets brought everything “to a boiling point.”
-- Congressional Republicans were left largely to chart their own course Monday in the absence of any unified messaging effort by their party. “One Senate Republican chief of staff … said that there was only ‘commiserating’ at such moments, ‘no coordination,’” Felicia Sonmez, Mike DeBonis and Paul Kane report. “‘Every man for themselves,’ said a House Republican close to party leadership. … But common themes quickly emerged. In responding to Trump’s tweets Monday, several Republicans echoed the president’s claim that the four women ‘hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion,’ while others cast them as lax on border security.”
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“British politician David Lammy branded Trump’s comments ‘1950s racism straight from the White House,’” Jennifer Hassan reports from London. “Prime Minister Theresa May, who has just days left in office, also condemned the tweets. ‘The prime minister’s view is that the language used to refer to these women was completely unacceptable,’ a Downing Street spokesman said. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt called the tweets ‘totally offensive.’ Former London mayor and former foreign secretary Boris Johnson said the president’s comments were ‘unacceptable.’ One of the two men will be selected prime minister next week. …
“Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, who was born and raised in the city and has frequently clashed with Trump, told a British radio station that this is the type of language he has heard for much of his life — though never from such a source. ‘I’ve heard it from racists and fascists. Never from a mainstream politician,’ he said. ‘Here you have the president of the U.S.A. using that same sort of language.’”
-- New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern criticized Trump on Radio New Zealand. “Usually I don’t get into other people’s politics, but it will be clear to most people that I completely and utterly disagree with him,” she said.
-- The Palestinian Authority, which has cut off ties with the White House over a succession of Trump policies that have favored Israel, called Trump’s statement an “insult” to the concept of American rule of law, according to the AP. “It’s an insult to the Statue of Liberty, America’s most famous symbol, an insult to the American values where migrants from all over the world are united as one nation under one law,” said Ibrahim Milhim, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority.
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Pelosi spoke late last night with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as they tried to broker a debt ceiling and budget deal with just days left before Congress leaves until after Labor Day. “The talks took on new urgency after Pelosi shot down a White House fallback plan that would have Congress raise the debt ceiling — potentially for just a short period of time — by late next week if they failed to reach a budget agreement,” Damian Paletta and Erica Werner report. “Pelosi said the idea of raising the debt ceiling on its own and not in conjunction with a budget agreement was not ‘acceptable to our caucus’ and therefore did not stand a chance of passage in the House. …
“People involved in the negotiations said they were not panicking and that there were still multiple options to avoid a full-blown crisis, and they also said that all sides were working hard to reach a resolution. One option would be for lawmakers and the White House to reach an agreement in principle on the budget before the August recess, temporarily raise the debt ceiling, and then agree on specifics in the intervening months. White House officials also remain unsure whether Pelosi will be able to whip up enough Democratic votes to pass a budget compromise, and some congressional aides remain wary of whether Trump will ultimately agree to whatever budget deal Mnuchin brings to him."
8) Irony is dead: Attorney General Bill Barr spoke yesterday at a Justice Department summit on combating anti-Semitism. He was not talking about Trump, of course, but his warnings about divisiveness seem applicable to this situation. “My concern today is that under the banner of identity politics, some political factions are seeking to obtain power by dividing Americans,” Barr said. “They undermine the values that draw us together, such as shared commitment to our country’s success. This is the breeding ground for hatred, and we must reject it.”
“We are a pluralistic nation composed of very distinct groups, each bound together by ethnicity, race, or religion – each group proud of its identity and committed to its faith and traditions,” he continued. “Yet despite these differences, we can be bound together into a broader community. Not one that seeks to grind away our distinctive identity. … But one that respects, indeed delights in, the freedom of each of us that give meaning to our lives – that help us understand our place and our purpose in this Creation. This real sense of community cannot be politically mandated. It arises from the genuine affinity, affection, and solidarity that grows out of a shared patriotism and that spontaneous feeling of fellowship that arises from a shared sense of place, shared experience, and common local attachments. These bonds are the surest safeguard against racial hatred.”
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