Rep. Ilhan Omar accused the US president of being “racist” and of “spewing fascist ideology” after Donald Trump’s supporters were heard chanting “send her back” during a rally as he was lambasting the Democratic congresswoman. RNA - “We have said this president is racist, we have condemned his racist remarks. I believe he is fascist,” Omar told reporters on Thursday, adding that she believes the verbal attacks are targeting not only her, but the very right to have a dissenting opinion, RT reported.
“I want to remind people that this is what this president and his supporters have [turned] our country, that is supposed to be a country where we allow democratic debate and dissent to take place,” Omar said.
The Somalia-born congresswoman went further and accused Trump of “spewing his fascist ideology on stage” – referring to the scandalous rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, in which a crowd of the president’s supporters started chanting “send her back” during his speech. Trump, who did not try to stop the chants, was at the time addressing what he called Omar’s “vicious anti-Semitic screeds”. He was also accusing her of supporting Al-Qaeda and smearing the US military involved in the Somalian war.
The incident triggered a wave of criticism, and Trump later attempted to downplay it, saying he actually “disagreed” with the chants.
“I felt a little bit badly about it,” Trump told reporters on Thursday, noting, “I would say that I was not happy with it. I disagreed with it. But again I didn’t say that. They did. And I disagreed with it.”
The scandalous rally came on top of the heated row between Trump and the so-called ‘squad’ of four Democratic congresswomen – Omar, Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Last week, Trump called upon the ‘squad’ to go back to the “totally broken and crime infested” countries from which they came from (except for Omar, the other three women were born in the US).
Despite the massive backlash and accusations of racism, Trump did not back down and quoted a Republican senator calling the group the “four horsewomen of [the] apocalypse” in his tweets ahead of the North Carolina rally.
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