In your face

Nervous Republicans, from senior members of Congress to his own daughter Ivanka, urged President Trump on Thursday to repudiate the “send her back” chant directed at a Somali-born congresswoman during his speech the night before at a rally in North Carolina, amid widespread fears that the rally had veered into territory that could hurt their party in 2020.

In response, Mr. Trump disavowed the behavior of his own supporters in comments to reporters at the White House and claimed that he had tried to contain it, an assertion clearly contradicted by video of the event.

[...]

At the rally Wednesday evening, he had been in the middle of denouncing her as an anti-American leftist who has spoken in “vicious, anti-Semitic screeds” when the chant was taken up by the crowd.

Pressed on why he did not stop it, Mr. Trump said, “I think I did — I started speaking very quickly.” In fact, as the crowd roared “send her back,” Mr. Trump paused and looked around silently for more than 10 seconds as the scene unfolded in front of him, doing nothing to halt the chorus.

[...]

Mr. Trump’s cleanup attempt reflected the misgivings of political allies who have warned him privately that however much his hard-core supporters in the arena might have enjoyed the moment, the president was playing with political fire, according to people briefed on the conversations.

Among them were House Republican leaders, who pleaded with Vice President Mike Pence to distance the party from the message embraced by the crowd in Greenville, N.C. Mr. Pence conveyed that directly to Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the exchange.

[...]

Mr. Trump’s inner circle immediately appreciated the gravity of the rally scene and quickly urged him to repudiate the chant. Ms. Trump, his elder daughter and senior adviser, spoke to the president about it on Thursday morning, the people familiar with the discussions said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

[...]

But while Republicans regard Ms. Omar and her fellow progressives who make up “the squad” — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — as particularly good embodiments of [progressive] radicalism, there is some concern that suggesting they leave the country makes the argument too personal and could backfire.

[...]

After the rally, Mr. Trump made no mention of any concern. “Just returned to the White House from the Great State of North Carolina. What a crowd, and what great people,” he tweeted.

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The feedback loop is so familiar by now that Mr. Trump’s staff explicitly warned him before the rally that the crowd would follow his lead as he spoke about Ms. Omar and to be careful not to let things spin out of control.

Even before Wednesday’s rally, his aides and advisers had spent days trying to manage the fallout from the president’s tweets on Sunday.

[...]

Many of Mr. Trump’s advisers immediately recognized that the tweets had crossed a new line, and they expected him to walk them back at the beginning of the week. But he did the opposite, renewing his call for the women to leave the United States. The charge that his tweets were racist “doesn’t concern me,” the president said, “because many people agree with me.”

[...]

Congressional Republicans, who offered only muted protest over the president’s initial remarks about the congresswomen, recognized that the spectacle in Greenville demanded a more vocal response. Some suggested that the episode, with its intimations of political persecution and even physical force, had violated sacred democratic norms.

  NYT

They haven't seemed to care about any of the many norms he's violated to date. Why are they worried about this? Are they just now waking up the realization that they've lost control of the monster they've created?

“Those chants have no place in our party or our country,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, told reporters.

Even as they denounced the crowd’s chant, Republican leaders declined to criticize Mr. Trump personally.

[...]

Mr. Walker said he had raised the issue with Mr. Pence at a breakfast on Thursday, saying the chant was “something that we want to address early,” before it became a staple of the president’s arena-style rallies. “We felt like this was going to be part of our discussion, to make sure that we are not defined by that.”

A little late, don't you think? "Lock her up" was such a success.

“I don’t think it’s racist to say,” Lindsey Graham told reporters. “I don’t think a Somali refugee embracing Trump would be asked to go back. If you’re racist, you want everybody to go back because they are black or Muslim. That’s not what this is about. What this is about to me is that these four congresswomen, in their own way, have been incredibly provocative.”

Lindsey Graham is a whore. But what he's inadvertently hit upon is that Trump is more narcissist than racist. Not that he isn't racist. A Somali refugee embracing Trump would be just fine, it wouldn't matter what else that refugee did or said.

House Democratic leaders said they were working to develop higher-level security protocols for Ms. Omar and her three colleagues, especially given an onslaught of threatening material on social media, where white nationalists have praised the president’s statements and the hashtag #SendHerBack was trending Thursday on Twitter.

[...]

“What I am scared for is the safety of people who share my identity,” said Ms. Omar, who has stood out in Congress with colorful head coverings. “When you have a president who clearly thinks someone like me should go back, the message that he is sending is not for me, it is for every single person who shares my identity.”

Exactly. And those women do not have security forces to protect them.

You can locate a zone of plausible deniability, in which one can claim support for [Trump's (anti-)immigration] policies on pragmatic, economic or “cultural” grounds, and not out of any desire to make the United States whiter. It’s precisely this zone that Republicans now seek to inhabit.

That’s why the GOP panic about the “send her back” chant is significant. It shines a floodlight into this zone and reveals why it’s so hard to credibly inhabit it.

What is it about “send her back” that suddenly crossed a line? Consider the timeline:

Trump tweets that the lawmakers should “go back” to their countries, characterizing them as corrupt hellholes (echoing his “s----hole countries” comment), even though three were born here. That elicits only a bit of discomfort from Republicans.

Trump then says, “if you hate our country, if you’re not happy here, you can leave.” Trump repeats this: "YOU CAN LEAVE!” Republicans defend this framing, piously pretending it has no racial dimension, even though it was directed at only minority lawmakers.

Trump presides over the “send her back” chant. After criticism erupts, including among some Republicans, Trump pretends to “disagree” with it.

[...]

The Times tells us Republicans fear telling lawmakers to get out will “backfire” because it appears “personal.” Yet Trump had repeatedly said to “go back” and “leave.”

What changed? Well, the Times also reports that Trump advisers privately warned against letting these sentiments get out of control at his rally.

So I submit to you that the key difference is twofold: Trump’s naked hatred and cruelty was captured on live television, and along with it, so was the seething anger of the hard-core Trump base.

  WaPo

Which may explain why I've been seeing so many pro-Trump tweets talking about how Democrats are out of control with their hatred.

The whole nation saw in dramatic fashion that Trump voters understood his meaning perfectly well, and watched them not just agree with it but also amplify it with as ugly and hate-curdled a chant as one could imagine.

And who starts those chants? I find it hard to believe they're as spontaneous as they look. Somebody starts it. Who?

The more that the suburban, educated whites who abandoned the GOP in 2018 grow convinced that this agenda is an outgrowth of racial animus and white nationalism, the worse it is politically for Republicans.

And so, officials have explained all this in benign terms: Trump wants to close “loopholes” that allow asylum seekers who don’t actually merit it to game the system; if Democrats would agree, fewer would come and border overcrowding would ease.

But in fact, Trump has taken all kinds of additional steps to make it harder for people to apply and qualify for asylum even if they do merit it. He’s now trying to shut asylum-seeking down. He has already slashed refugee flows dramatically and wants to cut them more. He tried (and failed) to cut legal immigration in half.

[...]

Trump campaigned on the idea that Muslims should be banned and that Mexican immigrants are rapists who must be walled out or criminals who must be removed en masse, which he reprised in his demagoguery toward Central American migrants in 2018.

[...]

It becomes a lot harder [for Republicans to inhabit the zone of plausible deniability] when Trump goes on national television and, seething with cruelty and hate, signals that a prominent representative of the immigrant and refugee community, a naturalized citizen and duly elected member of Congress, is not a member in good standing of the American nation, and his voters are right there with him on all of it.

And, btw, he will not rein it in.  He doesn't give a fig for the GOP.  It's all about him.  And he's thrilled to be the Hitler on the stage driving the mass of adorers to a frenzy.  The crowds! They love him!  The chanting is music to his ears.

UPDATE:



See what I mean?