The “send her back” rally chant that erupted after President Donald Trump’s criticism of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., would be unacceptable “in any other context in American life,” political analyst Ron Brownstein said Thursday.
In remarks on “The Situation Room,” Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic and CNN analyst, lamented what is being lost is “the magnitude of how aberrant this is.”
Brownstein originally made the case in a tweet Wednesday night after video of the chants went viral.
“If 20 high school students chanted this at a classmate, how many would be expelled?” he tweeted. “If 20 employees yelled this at a colleague how many would be fired? If 20 Army soldiers aimed this at a platoon mate how many would be discharged?
“How much of US will accept this as a new standard?”
On Thursday, Brownstein argued there’s too much focus on Trump’s “maneuvering.”
“If we focus on the maneuvering, we lose the magnitude of how aberrant this is,” he said. “To understand it, the original ‘go back,’ not to mention the chant, is to imagine it as I'm saying in any other context in American life.”
Trump triggered a backlash after he tweeted four Democratic minority congresswomen should “go back” to the countries they came from.
Three of the four outspoken freshman lawmakers, Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, were born in the United States. Omar came to the United States as a refugee of Somalia when she was a child.
Trump said Thursday he was “not happy” with the North Carolina rally chant.
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