Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sustained her criticism of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and rhetoric on Saturday, and said that what’s driving his agenda is “ethnicity and racism.”
The New York Democrat was speaking at a town hall in her home district of Queens to a crowd of over 200 people.
Ocasio-Cortez pointed to an incident at a pro-Trump rally in North Carolina last week when the crowd chanted “Send her back” in reference to another frequent target of the president, Rep. Ilhan Omar. The Minnesota Democrat was born in Somalia and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Trump, said Ocasio-Cortez, “relished” the chant. She countered the president’s false narrative that he spoke up quickly to stop it.
“He said, ‘Oh I stopped it immediately,'” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Roll the tape. He didn’t; he kind of presided over the situation, he relished it, he took it in, and he’s doing this intentionally.”
“He is using racism, he is stoking white supremacy, and he is allowing, frankly, a neo-Nazi group to go off unchecked because that is a key part of ‘rousing his base,'” she said.
The freshman congresswoman also pointed to Trump’s tweets from last week directed at herself, Omar, and fellow “Squad” members Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. In the tweets, fired off two days before the North Carolina rally, Trump said the progressive lawmakers should “go back” to their countries, which are “the worst, most corrupt, and inept anywhere.” Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Pressley were all born in the United States.
With the tweets, Ocasio-Cortez said at the town hall, Trump “said the quiet part aloud—that was his biggest mistake.”
“Because we know that he’s been thinking this the entire time. But he’s been keeping it in here. And this week, it went out here. When he started telling American citizens—where are we going to go? We’re going to stay right here, that’s where we’re going to go. We’re not going anywhere,” she said.
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