Examples
Wait, run that by me again?
The presidential trolling, just ahead of the political talk shows, seemed guaranteed to light a fire, potentially as a distraction from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids announced by Trump and due to be carried out in major cities on Sunday.
On CNN’s State of the Union Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, was asked if Trump’s tweets “feed into this impression that the president is racist and is pushing a racist agenda”.
Cuccinelli said the tweets were examples of “rhetoric for the presidential race”.
Excuse me? Telling four brown women, three of whom were born in the US, to “go back” is election rhetoric? And we just brush it off that way? Where are you “from,” Mr Cuccinelli? Would you like to hear Donald Trump telling you to go back there? Would you brush it off as election rhetoric?
Pelosi hasn’t helped; she pretty much handed Trump the ammunition.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., responded to a dismissive comment by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about her supporters’ “public whatever” by tweeting that “that public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s remark was prompted by a comment from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who was quoted in The New York Times on Saturday criticizing the New York legislator and three of her Democratic colleagues — Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — for voting against a border funding bill that had the support of a majority of House Democrats.
“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got,” Pelosi said, according to The New York Times.
She needs to stop doing that. (I’m sure it’s annoying to have young, new, inexperienced colleagues throwing their weight around, but that just is how electoral politics works, and she shouldn’t respond in ways that give Trump an opening for new horrors.)
Also, the Guardian (and anyone else who does it) needs to stop calling this kind of thing “trolling.” It might be trolling in a rando on Twitter, but from a president it’s dangerous racist incitement.
Yes, incitement. And it should be dealt with – especially from a president, of all people!
The rest of the world has been watching with increasingly open-mouthed horror at the appalling behaviour which he has been allowed to get away with. So much for norms, and checks and balances.
Sorry to say that Cuccinelli is from Virginia. Back in the day when we were still electing Republicans to statewide offices, he was our AG. Fortunately we had the good sense not to elect him governor.