THIS is what we are becoming....

It scares the fuck out of me....



I'm going to pull a newsletter review, because I am so worried I can't express it.

ANOTHER NEW LOW

President Trump viciously smeared Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night, prompting his supporters to chant “send her back!” while he stood back and relished it.  There’s no sugarcoating this—it’s a genuinely alarming and dangerous development. But the pushback has been fierce, and there are some signs that this won’t become routine. Here’s what happened: Trump has used Omar, a citizen who moved to the U.S. from Somalia as a child, as a scapegoat for months, and increasingly so since he was roundly condemned for telling her and three other American-born congresswomen of color to go back where they came from. His supporters chanted “send her back” after he falsely accused her of praising al Qaeda and slandered her as having a “history of launching vicious antisemitic screeds.”  After the rally, he tweeted of these chanters, “What a crowd, and what great people.” By Thursday morning, the sheer horror of what he’d done dawned on House Republican leaders, who pleaded with the White House to prevent it from becoming a fixture at his rallies like “lock her up.” (So much for those “Trump’s racism is a savvy political strategy” takes!) Trump apparently got the message, and told reporters he wasn’t “happy” about the chant and that he “very quickly” stopped it. You can tell he’s lying by, you know, watching the video. Note: These Republicans aren’t saying they won’t fall in line behind Trump again if the chant continues, just that they worry it’ll be politically damaging. (Very honorable of them.) So now we wait and see if Trump’s supporters take the hint, how Trump responds if the chant returns, and how Republicans and Democrats in Congress respond if he eggs it on.  We also wait and see how other institutions, particularly the media, treat this incident, and the GOP’s efforts to whitewash it, going forward. There’s no ambiguity about what has actually happened this week. But acknowledging hard truths about Republicans and the country has been a challenge that political journalism has never been able to rise to. Read →