Republicans on Tuesday almost unanimously refused to condemn Donald Trump’s series of tweets that as The Inquisitr reported were widely lambasted as “racist,” but one GOP House rep sought to change the definition of “person of color” to include himself.
“You know, they talk about people of color. I’m a person of color. I’m white,” Pennsylvania Republican Mike Kelly said, as quoted by the news site Vice . “I’m an Anglo Saxon. People say things all the time, but I don’t get offended.”
Trump’s tweets, which continued into Tuesday, as Vice reported, were directed at four first-year Democratic House representatives who have been labeled “The Squad.” All four are women of color. New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is of Puerto Rican descent. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is herself an immigrant from Somalia. And Massachusetts rep. Ayanna Pressley is African American.
In his tweets directed at the four Democrats, Trump told them to “go back” to the countries where they came from, even though all but Omar were born in the United States. “Go back to where you came from” has long been a phrase used to demean immigrants as well as people of color, as BuzzFeed News documented.
CNN commentator and former House rep. from South Carolina Bakari Sellers, who is African American, took to his own Twitter account to emphasize how familiar the “go back” statement has been to him and other people of color.
“Literally every Black or Brown person in public life has been told ‘go back to Africa’ at one point or another,” Sellers wrote.
News outlets, however, grappled with whether they should label Trump’s tweets “racist,” though several major media organizations did so. A CNN headline on Sunday read, “Trump tweets racist attacks at progressive Democratic congresswomen.”
The Washington Post Editor-in-Chief Martin Baron explained that his paper would also describe Trump’s tweets as “racist.”
“The ‘go back’ trope is deeply rooted in the history of racism in the United States. Therefore, we have concluded that ‘racist’ is the proper term to apply to the language he used,” Baron said in a published statement.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led the House in a vote Tuesday on a resolution to condemn Trump’s tweets as racist, according to NBC News . However, Republicans delayed the vote for hours as they attempted to stop Pelosi from speaking and strike her comments from the record because she called Trump’s tweets “racist.”
Ultimately, the resolution passed with a nearly party-line vote, 240 to 187. All 235 House Democrats voted to condemn Trump for the tweets, as CNN reported, with just four Republicans joining them.
Michigan’s Justin Amash, who quit the Republican Party and became an independent on July 4 after calling for Trump’s impeachment, as NBC News reported, also voted with the Democrats to condemn Trump.
