The Democratic AAPI candidates for POTUS have been vocal throughout the week in condemning Donald Trump’s racist attack against four Congress members of color by “othering” them even though they are US citizens.
“It is absolutely racist and un-American. And it is an old trope, ‘go back to where you came from,’ that you might hear on the street, but you should never hear that from the president of the United States,” said Sen. Kamala Harris, whose parents immigrated from India and Jamaica.
On Sunday, in a series of tweets, Trump said some Democratic congresswomen should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
While Trump did not name the targets of his attack, the context of his tweet made it clear it was aimed at a group of four progressive Democratic women of color – Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna S. Pressley. Except for Omar, the House members were born in the US. Omar became a citizen while still in her teens.
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning Trump’s remarks. Except for four Republicans who voted for the resolution, the tally was along party lines.
Of the three AAPI candidates, Harris issued the strongest reaction, saying Trump “needs to go back where he came from.” But all three of them took to Twitter multiple times the past week to clap back against Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Trump’s racist tweets “defile the office of the United States” and he has “taken the presidency to a new low,” Harris said in a CNN interview. “I don’t think that we can survive having a president of the United States who uses whatever voice he has in a way that is about dividing and fueling hate in our country.”
The 2020 presidential hopeful’s comments came after the vote to condemn the US president’s racist tweets on Tuesday night.
“He wants to distract by lighting fires around the issue of race and ethnicity – it’s disgusting … I think it is a turn for this president,” she continued. “Could it get any worse? Apparently yes, it just did. How low can he go?
“He needs to go back where he came from and leave that office.”
Hawaii’s Rep. Tulsi Gabbard told ABC News reporter Devin Dwyer that Trump’s remarks had “devastating consequences.”
“Stoking these racist feelings and stoking religious bigotry in this country, tearing apart an already divided country for his own political game is beneath the office of the presidency and undermines the very values and principles of our democracy,” said Gabbard.
She said Trump was using the platform of the presidency to tell critics that they should “go home.”
Andrew Yang also tweeted out:
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