Day 910: No, Trump doesn’t get any credit for kinda-sorta disavowing rally crowd’s racist chant

Donald Trump has led a scathingly racist attack against four Democratic congresswomen over the past week, doubling and tripling down on rhetoric that they should “go back” to their countries if they’re not happy in the U.S. His vitriol has ignored the fact that all four women are American citizens and three of the four were born in the U.S.

Fast forward to Wednesday night at Trump’s first rally since those attacks began and the crowd was whipped into a frenzy by Trump and began chanting en masse about Rep. Ilan Omar (D-MN), “send her back!”

Trump basked in the racist chant, pausing for at least 12 seconds, and even nodded while it was going on.

Thursday morning, however, Trump was asked about the chant and tried to distance himself from it.

Trump deserves absolutely zero credit for the pathetic attempt to get himself out of hot water for many reasons.

• He’s lying through his teeth during his explanation. He claimed he tried to drown out the chant by speaking “very quickly,” but the Wednesday clip reveals the exact opposite. As opposed to moving on, he actually intentionally paused to allow the chant to pick up steam.
• He never strongly condemned the chant. Sure, he threw out a, “I disagree with it, by the way,” but then made making excuses like “it started up rather fast,” whatever that means.
• He never disavowed it at the time. If the chant was so distasteful to him, he could have stopped it right then and there by instructing his audience to do so. As opposed to John McCain in the run up to the 2008 election, who stopped racist attacks about Barack Obama from audience members, Trump allowed them to continue full bore but saying nothing and doing nothing.
• He incited the chant in multiple ways. Not only was Trump ripping Omar and the other congresswomen in his speech on Wednesday, but the chant is the exact same message Trump was spreading in the week prior. There’s virtually no difference between Trump’s multiple “go back” comments and the crowd’s “send her back” chant, the former of which Trump has claimed isn’t racist.
• He never mentioned disavowing the chant until asked directly about it by a reporter. If it was that abhorrent, there would have been an unprompted comment or a tweet or something from Trump. Instead, there was total silence until he was pressed about it the day after seeing the fallout on cable news.
• Finally, the chant — or one like it — absolutely will happen again during a Trump event. In all likelihood Trump will chuckle and say something like, “you know we’re not supposed to be saying that these days” or will point to the media and say “if you don’t stop they’re going to say I’m making you do this.” He always plays to his crowd’s worst tendencies and Wednesday was more of the same. When it happens in the future, Trump’s true colors and lack of remorse will be of full display yet again.

910 days in, 552 to go

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