Donald Trump caused national outrage last weekend when, before playing a round of golf, posted a series of tweets in which he attacked four Democratic women in Congress — all of them women of color — telling them, as The Inquisitr reported, to “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
The demand that members of minority groups “go back to where they came from” has a long history as a form of racial abuse against those groups, as a Washington Post historical report explained. But according to a new report, Trump simply did not understand the meaning of what he had said on Twitter.
According to a Washington Post investigation “based on interviews with 26 White House aides, advisers, lawmakers and others” top White House aides led by Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump’s top advisers, were forced to confront Trump when he returned from his golf outing — explaining to him exactly why his tweets were causing headlines around the country, “upsetting allies and enraging opponents.”
The Post report portrays a clueless Trump protesting that he was simply responding to a segment he had viewed that morning on the Fox News program Fox & Friends — which as reporter Matt Gertz has documented in a Politico report, has frequently been the direct inspiration for Trump’s more outrageous Twitter postings.
Trump also told Conway that with the tweets, he was attempting “to elevate the congresswomen” whom he saw as “good foils,” according to the Post report, and that “he thought he was interjecting himself into Democratic Party politics in a good way.”
But Conway nonetheless felt “compelled” to explain why telling women of color to “go back” to the “places from which they came” was being interpreted as racist by large segments of the country. The four Democratic women, as The Inquisitr noted, are Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who is African-American; Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib who is of Palestinian descent; New York rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose background is Puerto Rican; and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a former refugee from Somalia who is a naturalized American citizen. Of the four, only Omar was not born in the United States.
“He realized that part of it was not playing well,” South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham — one of Trump’s most outspoken allies in the Senate — told The Post . Graham had been Trump’s golf partner on Sunday, after Trump posted the tweets, and said that Trump had not even mentioned the tweets or the four Democratic women during their round of golf.
