Kudos to the Houston Chronicle editors

At a rally Wednesday, after indulging in an extended, falsehood-filled rant against Omar, Trump basked with approving silence at the crowd’s raucous chanting — “Send her back! Send her back!” — only to later say he didn’t agree with the statement.

At one point during the week, [President] Trump tweeted: “This is about love for America.”

We beg to differ.

To love America is to love that it was born to stand against ancient notions of people’s coercive loyalty and allegiance to power. Obedience and compliance are the stuff of totalitarian regimes — not of the Declaration of Independence, which states: “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” any government that has become destructive.

[...]

Our country and our ‘leaders’ are getting dumber all the time.

The world is laughing at us. We’re like a bunch of patsies.

Our country is in serious trouble; we don’t have victories anymore.

Clearly, the above statements, on their face, are not pro-American. But are they anti-American?

The answer for too many of us depends on who is doing the speaking.

It was President Donald J. Trump who uttered those comments, and his supporters would say he did so with an intent to make America better.

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His own inauguration speech was a dystopian vision of “American carnage” and “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones.”

  Houston Chronicle

Yes. As others have pointed out, it's ironic that someone wearing a MAGA hat would insist people who are unhappy with the country should leave it. But then, someone wearing a MAGA hat probably doesn't understand irony.

They might assign a different intent altogether if the speaker were someone else — someone such as U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, whose birthplace of Somalia, Arabic name, head scarf and skin color have led some to question her American bona fides. Even though she’s a duly elected congresswoman. Even though she swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. Even though she’s an American citizen who came here as a child refugee.

[...]

What makes a true American?

Is it someone who blindly supports the current occupant of the White House — right or wrong? And if so, how many of us would truly meet that standard — either now or during President Obama’s administration? Or is it someone who believes as Carl Schurz, a German-born U.S. senator said in 1871: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”?

The latter, of course. And that's what all the MAGA voters were saying (MAGA) before Trump suggested four dark-skinned Congresswomen should get out of the country (ignorantly saying they should go back to their "own" countries, when three of the four were born in America).

Americans have always debated this question, and politicians have always exploited it. During McCarthy’s communist witch hunts, during Vietnam, and now.

Not to mention, during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Other Republicans parroted [Trump's] derision [of their fellow Congress members], and only four out of 191 in the U.S. House — among them, Texas’ Rep. Will Hurd of Helotes — voted to condemn it.

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The oath of citizenship doesn’t require a vow of silence; new citizens pledge to “support and defend the Constitution,” which protects dissent.

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True love of country is expansive, encompassing both pride in America’s exceptionalism and obligation to speak out against her failings.

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Over its 243-year history, our country has often been prodded onto a better path by those who raised their voices against injustice — from the founding fathers who sloughed off the yoke of monarchy to the abolitionists who worked to dismantle slavery, from suffragettes who fought for a woman’s right to vote to Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders (also branded as anti-American at the time) who marched for equality.

Trump, who also told black athlete Colin Kaepernick to “find another country” after he protested police brutality, parades in the mantle of American iconography -- claiming he is defending the anthem, the flag, the Fourth of July — while he tramples the values those symbols represent.

[...]

As Americans, born here or journeyed here, it is our highest calling to work to “form a more perfect union,” to speak truth to power through votes and words. It is our duty to push back against despotism and those who would seek to divide us — especially if the divider resides in the White House.

UPDATE: Also, this president often remarks that we don't want criminal elements coming into this country, usually specified as rapists and sex traffickers. He's been credibly accused of rape by more than one woman, and he has a history of association with Jeffrey Epstein, a man who escaped justice over a decade ago and about to be tried again in another state for sex trafficking.



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I'm sensing a pattern.

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